Note to Self

By Kathleen Bradean

Ignore the hideous wallpaper. It was on the hovel walls when we moved in, and fifteen years later, I have yet to replace it.

My days are all very much like the ones that came before, so it all seems deadly dull stuff. I work a ten hour day plus spend another two hours commuting, so between 5AM and 5PM, my day looks like any other working schlub's. (Except that while I'm driving, I'm thinking about plot, character, and other pleasant diversions instead of the stuff normal people think about, like... I'm drawing a blank here. What do normal people think about?) Then one of us cooks dinner, we sit down together to eat, and after about 7:30 my time is mine to waste as I see fit. I watch maybe two hours of TV a week so I'll have time to write. Or, to be truthful, to read emails, mess around on FaceBook, look up some really esoteric minutia that passes as research, and then maybe do some writing before bed. Or I read and write reviews. Or do blog entries. It's not exactly the life of Castle, is it?

So while I sat at my desk and tried to think of a way to make it seem as if I lead a terribly interesting writer's life, my gaze flitted past my current Note To Self. Aha! Writerly stuff! So I took a picture with my phone (thus the crappy quality, but I hope that helps hide the handwritten "typo" in my note) and posted it here.

This is my third attempt at a novel titled The Devil's Concubine. It's been a real struggle. The first pass was my NaNoWriMo novel. I'd never done NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, in which you try to pound out 50,000 words of a novel between November 1st and 30th) so I thought I'd give it a go. It proved that I can produce 50,000 words in a month, but also proved that I produced 50,000 words of utter crap. That isn't the fault of the pressure. The problem was that one of my characters lacked definition before I started, and I was never able to pin down his squirrelly butt. Plus, my plot sucked.

In January, I took another stab at it. 80,000 words, but again, nothing I'd show to someone. I still didn't have a clear vision of the story, and it showed.

Then, during a commute, I had an epiphany. It came in part because of something Michael Thomas Ford said in his master class at Saints and Sinners literary conference. I realized that I had never forced myself to define what the story was about. After noodling over it for a couple days, I figured it out. So I wrote it down and taped it to the wall next to my computer so that if I ever lost sight of what I was supposed to be doing, it was there to remind me.

Figuring out what the story was about was closely followed by the definition of the plot. It's a very simplified version of the whole complex spy thriller I have in mind, but at it's core, this is what happens in the story.

What's the main conflict? I have to remind myself. Isn't that sad? But since most of the caper involves a third character, it's been too easy to shift my focus to him. That's went wrong with the other two attempts at this story.

What drives the plot? This is where the third character is important. He's the catalyst that puts the plot into motion.

So there you have it, a sloppy handwritten note taped over world's ugliest wallpaper so that I can keep on track in this story. A day in the life. Whoo-hoo. Riveting stuff.