If you can’t bully your way in the front door and you can’t sweet talk
your way into the back, it is perfectly acceptable to shimmy down the chimney.
Please note that this sound advice is only suitable for a writer trying
to finagle her way into a new story. In any and all other circumstances, this
strategy would most rightfully result in a charge of stalking and/or breaking
and entering. This would be bad. Very bad.
Now, with that disclaimer made, I’d like to spend the rest of this post
bragging about my chimney-shimmying.
As I’ve noted in the previous couple of blogs, I’ve had trouble getting
into the late Colonial dialogue required for my Six Brothers project.
Yesterday, after several hours of extremely slow, plodding-through-the-proverbial-mud
writing, I ended up with the first 120 words of my 100K novel done. Consider
those numbers for a moment.
This is bad. Very bad.
So, I started shimmying. Madly.
I went to my “Colonial” dictionary (thousands of terms used in the time
period by “normal folk”) and started randomly picking out words or phrases. I
would then come up with a sentence of dialogue, including the chosen word, for
somewhere in the mammoth outline. I would then start sculpting out a scene
around these token sentences.
And voila! I had wordage.
Weird? Yep.
Successful? Yep.
And that’s my chimney-shimmy, ladies and gents. Take it or leave it. I
offer it only as an option for a locked-out writer.
Until tomorrow…
Chloe
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