Story Exploder

This is now becoming a bit of a tradition on this site. During the month of November I will take my hand at a little bit of short fiction that I make up on a daily basis. This breaks every rule I have for writing. Not knowing what the story is ultimately about and where it is heading is both scary and foreign to me - which is why I insist on doing it. It puts my brain in a mode that I am not used to. It stretches it.

This year was exceptionally hard for me. I came close to giving up a few times around the half way mark which I think is the hardest part of the story. The first 10 instalments are about building the world, the middle 10 instalments are about giving the characters something to do. The last 10 instalments are about bringing it all together.

The prompts are interesting for me in that they help get things kicked off at the start. Even though they are a single word in 50 they do play an important role. When I know where the story is meant to be heading is when I drop them. This year I used them all the way up to day 25 (shows how completely lost I felt this year).

The final story (and title) will be published next week after I have had a few days to let it all sink in. I can get the editing machete to the whole body of text, fine tuning and pruning it into something more coherent. What’s currently published on the site is the first draft. We all know that mostly these are…raw.

Plan is now to go back to writing about randomness that I have actually missed this last month and a half.