Intro

Welcome to Episode Three of the Write Away podcast. I’m your host, Crys Cain, and I am recording this May the 5th. This week in my writing progress, it was really consistent, which is something that I have been missing a lot for quite a while. I averaged between about 2000-2400 words every day without having to like sit at the keyboard and drag it out of myself.

I utilized a lot of sprints, which have kind of been my savior, both in getting the words down and enforcing me to get away from my really janky desk system that I really can’t change until I can travel and go to places that sell decent desk chairs and stuff. But with the combo of the sprints and getting up and laying around in my bed in between sprints, I’m actually doing pretty well on both points of progress, health and words.

I actually did so well on the cozy mystery that I ran out of plot. I’m not— with romance, I know the genre well enough I’m able to plot it from start to finish before I sit down and even think about starting to write the actual prose. As I’ve been getting into other genres, I find that I actually get overwhelmed because they’re not as tight in their expectations as romance.

There’s a book called Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes that’s actually a really good pattern for romances of what the reader expects on their emotional journey. And a lot of people don’t like the formulaicness of romance, but there’s a certain pattern that readers expect. not in the actual “things that happen,” but in the emotional responses they have, and that book covers it really well.

But when you get into almost any other genre, the emotional expectation is not nearly as strict. And so I kind of get an a choice paralysis, a choice overload. And what I’ve been doing is only plotting a few scenes ahead of time to limit my fear of plotting the wrong things or just feeling like I have to know where everything is going when I’m still in the learning process of these individuals genres.

And I don’t know if I’ll ever be a full plotter-outer with space opera, or just science fiction in general, because there are so many paths. But maybe I’ll get to a point of comfort where I’m like, okay, I know the kind of stories I like to tell in this genre-slash-setting, and so I feel really comfortable in knowing where I want to take this whole story.

But as it is, I tend to plot just a few, like, five scenes ahead. And I ran out of plot. So I switched projects for a little bit while I tried to get into a super creative mindset. I need more of a deep-thinking mindset when I’m plotting and I was just exhausted over the weekend. I switched to a different project that was already plotted out and had a lot of fun putting words down on that.

And then yesterday I was he able to get into the project. I had to move some scenes around because I’d gotten to that point where I’m like, “Oh, something is wrong.” Not just I’ve run out of plot, but also something is wrong and I don’t know where to go from here because the wrong thing will affect everything from here.

I know a lot of people will say, just write your crappy first draft and continue. I agree with that to a certain extent, but when I know something is super wrong, I have to fix it. So I did that, and really, all it was is that I had to take the last scene I’d written and move it about three scenes previous, and then adjust things to follow from that. And then boom, problem solved. I was able to move forward. So that was quite exciting.

Other than the writing, I’m a big learner and one of the things I’ll probably ...