Summer is here!! I hope everyone is finding a nice sunny place to spend these next couple of months. One thing that I look forward to during this season is the warm afternoons filled with the dwindling noise of the city. I like to wait until it quiets down turns into a serene breezy twilight.
There are owl nests near our home so that is also very soothing to hear and sets a very appropriate mood to write.
This summer I’ll be joining a friend and a few other writers in a cabin for Camp NaNo. I quasi attempted the one in April but ended up actually planning out what I’ll be writing during the month of July. Funny, I never thought of myself as a planner or a panster but alas I’ve discovered I am a little bit of both. I think writing with a plan and writing without one can work under the right circumstances. But who knows what the right circumstances are sometimes those just happen.
In April I really wanted to just write something else, pants until the day of until something just clicked while I was watching Netflix. I spent a few days in the beginning thinking about it and writing stuff out and fleshing out these characters, the setting…etc., but I wasn’t really writing the story. So, that was April. I thought the story would come and vamos, but no. It happens.
Then in May, more stuff clicked. This new story is new indeed, but the more I fleshed out and thought about what the story, the more I discovered how it’s connected to the main story I’ve already written.
So how have I prepared myself for the summer camp? Also I’ve never been camping so this writing camp, sitting outside and the owls hooting every so often is really as much camping as I’ve ever done. Smores on the griddle anyone?
I’ve made a rather breathable outline of what I know the story is so far and where I want it to go. I say this because…well I like to have breathing room. Sometimes things don’t go as planned and I’m okay with it. I want the story to flow and not have characters move like chess pieces across a platform. That’s something I’ve noticed in some stories, movies, tv shows, and definitely in my previous drafts. When it feels stiff it needs to go, and well do what needs to be done restructure, rewrite it, and repeat. I think this is what they mean by ‘killing your darlings.’ So breathing room is so necessary for me, but also I need to have an idea of where I’m going.
In five days Camp Nano starts and I am as ready as I’ll be. Wooo!
What are you writing? Are you doing Camp Nano or joining another summer writing initiative? Let me know!
.Rosario
Lemmon Avenue 