Saturday 20 March 2010

Your writing process is weird...

You know, it's weird, this writing process.

I fully intended to spend this weekend revising stuff on ZoQuNo and getting onto paper (or screen) the thoughts that have been rolling around in my mind for the last week or so (I spend a lot of time working through ideas, as you've probably guessed by now).

This morning, however, I had one of those flashes that all of us writers talk about but experience rather infrequently. A couple of years ago (I have notes dated mid-2008, but the thinking would have gone back further), I came up with a concept that I thought was very good, which I called "Project Gash". I put it on the back-burner because, although I had a rush of ideas with the initial bombshell, I couldn't work out what it was about.

A couple of months back, I read an interview with Mark Morris and he mentioned damaged people and I knew that this description (a wonderful one, for a writer) would perfectly fit most of the characters in "Project Gash". That was dropped into the pot and the whole thing went back on the simmer.

So this morning, out of nowhere, a huge chunk of the story plotted itself out for me. I ran it by Alison & Matthew as we drove over to Northampton, then wrote up a quick batch of notes before tea (560 words worth!).

I won't go into any more detail, in case this thing falls over before it starts, but I'm really pleased that it's happened at all - whether I go with "Gash" or ZoQuNo, things are beginning to happen now and that can only be a good thing!

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