I Reject Your Reality

I don't write nonfiction.

On at least two occasions, someone has said to me, "Oh, you're a writer? You should write my tragic real life story." And then I have to find a nice way to say that I don't want to do that. I'm not interested in the confines of reality. That's not really my kind of thing.

What I really want to say is that their story is not interesting to me, and I don't want to write it. But that makes me sound like a dick. So I just have to awkwardly try to convince them to drop it.

I don't want to write a story that's about a real person who is then going to read the story. That's way too much pressure.

The Great Scene Excision of 2019

This is what I'm looking at right now.

 

It's every scene in Cold Blooded, or rather, in the rough draft NaNo abomination that is going to become Cold Blooded. I took my list of scenes, and starting putting notes on them, determining the fate of that scene. Then I color coded them, because colors are pretty.

Looking Back and Looking Forward

Step One is complete. I have broken the rough draft into 41 scenes, or scene-like entities. Technically, "Scene" 41 is just all the extra nonsense at the end, but I've been putting in section breaks at each scene change, so I can jump straight there, so Scene 41 is just where I would go if I want any of that.

So I have 40 scenes, really. Some are long, some are short. Some are probably several scenes crammed together, while others are just random events. But they're all broken up and catalogued. Now comes the tricky part: Figuring out what to keep and where to put it.