I assaulted poor Dawn Embers with my overuse of the word ‘writing’ yesterday. This morning I realized this morning that my tangent was one spurred by her post about non-writing, giving me a fantastic excuse to link back to someone else again.
Be warned – if I follow someone’s blog it’s for a reason and I will probably eventually link back to all of them. My ramblings will become a twisted sort of wiki-type articles.
Anyway…non-writing…there are bits I don’t like (have I mentioned I’m not fond of rewrites?), and there are bits I like. One of the things I like very best: brainstorming. I honestly don’t know how I ever wrote without a sounding board (and she’d be offended to hear me call her that). Oh, wait, I didn’t really ever write before that. I had some short stories that friends and I put together in high school – they’re absolutely horrible. I had them printed and bound as graduation gifts for everyone who helped, and I still have a copy. I suppose technically that makes me self-published, but I don’t claim those stories. ANYWAY…different post for a different time.
Brainstorming, I’m in love with it. I’m practically married to it. I had this idea yesterday and I bounced it off one person (thank you Mireyah) and it met with a *ahem* positive response ^_^. But I knew it still had holes, so last night I got together with the other half of my creative team (yeah, it’s true, I don’t write anything myself…all of my ideas are fleshed out by my other half). We bounced ideas back and forth, and took the grandiose and vague and made it something tangible (but not) and…amazing.
I’ve been looking for a new idea to get excited over. Something I haven’t done before. Something I haven’t seen in this incarnation before. And I think I’ve found it. If I spun it right, I could go William Gibson with it…and speaking of…maybe I need to read some more of his books. Not Johnny Neumonic, though – too much violence for what I’m looking for.
Does anyone else bounce plot ideas off their friends and/or family, or am I the only one who thinks this is integral to the writing process?
I don’t bounce plot ideas off anyone before I write, but once something’s written, and there are problems, I have a few people I can bounce ideas off to see if they might work. I’m in the process of doing that with a sticky spot in P & P at the moment….
But I love brainstorming with GT on our screenplay. It’s amazing what we come up with together!
Awww. I feel so special that you linked to my blog. *beams*
I tend to bounce my ideas off Ashy. Used to just be on writing.com but now we chat more on Twitter than anything else. She’s basically my alpha reader. I sometimes tell my sister or stepdad, but for the most part the new ideas stay either with Ashy or an occasional post on a blog. The rest of my brain storming happens in my head, instead of on the computer.
And I do have one novel that even Ashy doesn’t know the details of because it’s a Sekrit. It’s kinda fun to have a novel that I’ll hint at but never give away the details. It’s also being written in a journal instead of on the computer so it’s easier to fight the urge to share. Sekrit novels are fun.
I wrote one of my novels in sekrit, without doing anything but hinting to anyone. That may have been one of the hardest things I ever did – I thrive off input. But for that particular story, something told me it wouldn’t get written right unless I wrote it before I shared.
So I guess technically I go either way ^_^
I couldn’t handwrite though – I have to do it on the computer.
Handwriting is new for me. It’s hard because I have problems with my hand due to years of bowling and such. So, after about ten minutes of writing my hand and wrist hurt. But it’s definitely a different experience than typing.