I once wrote a story, or part of a story, about a kid who gets transported to some medieval land and has to find his way home.
Side note, I like just starting my posts all abruptly. I imagine it's like I just strolled into your living room and started telling you a story you weren't anticipating and didn't ask for.
Anyway, something reminded me of that story. I knew how it began, and kind of how it ended, but I never got around to figure out the middle. I haven't even seen this story in years. I wonder…
This just in, I have it on my external hard drive. I have reread it, and it's kind of terrible. In my defense, it was written about eight years ago. At least I can say I've improved since then.
That story all got started because a certain type of character had come to my attention. It's that guy who takes off right when you start to think you can count on him, and then shows up again right when all hope is lost. I wanted to write a character like that. This story, called "On the Dagger's Edge," was my attempt. I never got to that part of the story though. All I had was a few very short chapters of assembling the team and getting from one place to another.
The weird thing is, I remember all kinds of other parts to the story. I think some of them are written on paper… somewhere, but most of them were just rolling around in my head. Apparently, they're still in there.
This was one of my earlier attempts at a "journey" story. You know, some people are going somewhere for some reason. And it had a lot of the same problems that The Long Road has. If it takes a long time to get anywhere, what are they doing or talking about on the way? If you try to show each conversation, you're going to run out of things to say and get boring real quick. If you skip over most of it, you have to wonder what they were doing the whole time. You can't win.
Something made me think of this old story, and I thought, maybe I should finish it. But looking at it now, my god, it needs a lot of work. Basically, I'd have to start all over, because the writing is just shit. Also, it has a prologue. Gross.
Maybe that'll be a project for a later date. Maybe one day I'll go through and rewrite all my old stories. There would be a lot. A whole fucking lot. And some of them are really bare-bones. And some of them are really bad. It might be interesting to rewrite one, then share the before and after, so you can see how far it's come.
Is that something you'd all be interested in? Let me know. Give me feedback. Please.
I'll see you Saturday, probably. Maybe.
Aha! Another journey story. :) Even if it's poorly written, or written by a younger you anyway, it has bones. Use those to improve it. You aren't the same person you were 8 years ago (hopefully), your story will have also grown. Give it a go! Give it an outline and make it a serial.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you don't have to write every minute of the day of travel. People sleep a lot on car rides. You can have the backseat passenger drift off and wake up at the next destination covered in sunflower seed shells that the front seat passenger was throwing out his open window, but came back in the back open window. (I did that to my sister once. I also woke her abruptly by pouring my root beer out the window, only for it to come back in the back window and waterboard her). They can be playing road trip games (find something that starts with "A", "airport! Yay!" now "B". Fade out, fade back in on Q (those are notoriously hard to find)). Or everyone is arguing about the next stop to make, fade out, fade in hours later on the same stupid argument, but the destination has been missed. Gloss over the boring, getting there stuff, and focus on the exciting things that happen on the way.