Of course the point of NaNoWriMo is to get over the feeling that your words are precious and must be perfectly crafted. That is for editing. The first thing you need to do is simply get ANY words out on the paper. Or word document. Or as I've been doing, Blog. And in that regard, this exercise I've been doing has been a good lead up to that. The lead-up that I haven't done is the pre-writing steps of coming up with a coherent story. But maybe I'll start by just trying to write various scenes, and stitch them together. So in honor of Halloween, and the completion of my month-of-blogging, here's a scene. And no, the rest of the story has not been written around it yet...
Dan felt the fingers tracing gently over his neck and upper back, but he was strapped face down on the table and couldn't turn his head enough to see the man standing over him.
"Your really should have been more careful," the man spoke in a calm, quiet voice. "Because of you, two people are dead, and a little boy is paralyzed. Was it worth it? Was Margarita Tuesday really worth the amount of pain you've brought into the world?"
Dan squirmed against his restraints, but there was almost no slack. Thrashing as hard as he could, he could only rotate his shoulders a few inches either direction. "Please... it was an accident... I didn't mean to hurt anybody."
"Maybe that was true the first two times you were arrested for DUI. But you knew you had a problem. You could have called a cab, or ridden home with friends. Instead you got behind the wheel of a Cadillac Escalade even though your license was suspended..."
"What are you doing? Please don't kill me," Dan pleaded.
Okay, I have more in mind, but what do YOU think happens next? What would you LIKE to see happen? (Hmmm... There's another idea for an entire blog, written as a Choose Your Own Adventure, with links to other entries in the blog as you read through it...)
4 comments:
Phil, don't stop your blog, it's entertaining. You make me want to start my own blog. I just don't think anyone would read it. It may not please my department either. Can blogs be anonymous?
I liked your story. I think that they put a chip inside his spine so that when he is over the legal limit to drive, he's paralyzed. New meaning to the words "paralytic drunk".
I want more stories. I don't mind if they aren't quite finished or polished. I don't even mind if you retell stories from other things (ahem, neutron star, I'm looking at you).
Fiction or nonfiction, the posts have been pretty great. I'm glad you are writing. And I'm happy you got me to do NaNoWriMo. If I hadn't, exciting things may not be happening now.
Stacy: Thanks for being a faithful reader this past month, and offering comments. I love comments! :) I suspect you actually have far more good bloggable stories than I do, and that they would be approachable to a larger audience. After all, people interact with cops all the time, and there is a lot of mis-information about your profession. As for anonymous blogging, yes and no... You can set up accounts that would allow you to write without any obvious link to you, but when all is said and done, if someone wants badly enough to find you out, they probably will. It's also hard to have any sort of details without greatly narrowing the search space for you. Plenty of anonymous writers have been "outed" by their own words...
Elecia: You're direction for my fractional scene is much more pleasant than where I was going with it! :) And I'll try to get more stories done, and even publish some of them here. I don't think that I could do justice to a re-telling of Dragon's Egg, though. I do have significant chunks of a post-apocalyptic story written though...
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