Breaking Blocks

I'm going to be honest, I haven't written anything super exciting. That's the problem of having a word goal of only 10,000. That means the daily quota is only 334. So we're not exactly flying through this. I did write some dialogue that I liked, but I don't think it stands on its own very well.

So I guess we're going to talk about writer's block today. I wouldn't say that I'm blocked, really, but I don't really know what happens next. Luckily, I have a whole pile of things to deal with just that. As Municipal Liaison for NaNo, I like to provide all kinds of helpful stuff for my NaNoites. I have two bags of little paper slips that I take to write-ins.

One is labeled Scene Unstickers. These are random events that can happen to get a scene moving, such as:

• A fire breaks out
• Someone makes a confession
• Someone is running late
• Two words: Tequila shots
• Someone DIES!

The other is the Big Bag of Steves. It involves the many misadventures of a guy named Steve (there's a story there I'll eventually explain). These include:

• Steve shops for kiwis out of season
• Steve doesn't look where he's going
• Steve doesn't think it's poisonous
• Steve calls everyone by the wrong name
• Steve wants to invade the North Pole

The idea is that you draw one of these out of the bag, and try to steer your story toward making that thing happen. This might not be the best part of your story, but the idea is to get the story moving and the words flowing. Hopefully this random thing will lead to other things.

As for my story, The Shattered World, some random thing needs to happen right now, to get things moving. So later today I'll probably be diving into my stash of inspirational tidbits, and we'll see where it goes from there. Hopefully by Friday I'll have something more exciting to report.

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