Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Day 24 of the 365 Days of Blogging

The author, Dane F. Baylis

Talk About Execution (Of Projects)

Well, I'm glad the qualifier was added to this one. I've definitely been out cruising the darker side of the human psyche these days and that could have been just a wee bit...uh...edgy.
 
As far as execution of projects goes, I'm one of those plodders out there. I believe in outlines and character studies and plot arcs and all that. This means I spend a lot of time trying to get to actually know my characters and their environment. This will take the shape of details that occur well before the story I'm presenting begins and my reader may never get to know. But, for me, it is an essential part of understanding not only what my characters are doing, but why they are doing it.
 
So yes, I may spend as much as a month or more working out the details for a short story, and this after walking around for god knows how long letting the thing simmer in cerebral soup until I'm sure a) I want to write it, and b) It's ready to be written. Once those two questions have been sufficiently answered I get to work. Does this mean that I really had the timing right? Look in my in works in progress file and you'd see that there are any number of tales in suspended animation. This is usually caused by hitting a point in all the outlining and development where I realize I went off half cocked and the story isn't there. It may be an interesting vignette, a rambling anecdote or even a decent scene or two. Just not the story I thought I was heading towards.
 
Once all the preliminaries are done we're off to the races. The advantage of all the pre-planning for me is that I can pretty much concentrate on the language and emotion of what I'm developing knowing that the story is there like a skeleton awaiting muscle and guts and flesh and hide. I've pretty much assured myself that I won't go tumbling into a major plot hole that will require me to set fire to a hundred or so pages and pick it up from what's left.
 
Presently I'm working on a thriller (my first novel length piece) and I've already spent weeks just pulling together the outline and character studies not to mention researching locations and a thousand other things. I've committed about fifty five hundred words to paper in first draft form just to see what they might look like and the result so far is, IMHO, not half bad. In the meantime, there are notes for other projects, poems to be written and others to be revised, submissions to be made and blogging to keep up with. I guess what I just said is, for me, execution is a constant process. How about you?
 
Accepting short fiction to 1200 words, poetry to 25 lines and carefully thought out essays for the Your Work/Your Love page. No pay just exposure. You retain all rights. You're welcome to follow or subscribe, I love the company. Comment, critique, or question in the box below.
 
The usual, please remember to...live,love,write.
 
 
Dane F. Baylis   

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