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Hey folks, welcome to Spitball!, the world's first screenplay written by blog.You may want to read the posts in our about section, particularly our Statement of Purpose

Or, you can start on the first post and work your way through sequentially by using the 'suceeding' links above the post name.

Who?

There are two of us here: Kent M. Beeson (aka Urban Shockah) bio, and Martin McClellan (aka Burley Grymz) bio.

Speedy Synopsis

After fighting through 50 different story ideas, the boys have picked Time to Die as the script to write. They are now starting the writing process.

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Re: National Novel Writing Month

November 02, 2006 · by The Urban Shockah · Permalink · comment on this post in the forum · Category: Original Version, communiqués

Well, NaNoWriMo is a bitch this year. It's only the second day, and I'm not going to make the 2000 word count -- in fact, right now I'm just trying to put down enough words to bring my total to two standard days' worth (3,334) and even though I'm only about a hundred words short, I'm not even sure I'm gonna make that.

Part of me is wondering if taking on Little Black Stray was such a good idea -- part of the point of NaNoWriMo is to start a novel with absolutely no idea what it's about or where it's going to go, and clearly I've side-stepped that. I don't know if I feel particularly weighted down by having some concepts worked-out (or at least pencilled-in) but this does create a kind of "fenced-in" mentality -- here are the characters and concepts, and stray beyond them if you dare.

But still, that's more a question of will and nerve than anything else. No, right now the big problem is realizing, once again, that I'm not a novelist. The canvas is just too big. It's difficult to figure out just what I should be writing at any given moment -- when you have the choice of describing what's actually happening at that particular second in the story, or what happened five years ago, or what a character is thinking, or the shape and texture of a bed, or a million other different things... well, that's too many choices for me.

If anything, I'm a dramatist, which is a completely different thing. I'm used to present tense and conflict. I'm used to imagining something happening now, something that I could witness right in front of me. I could use present tense in the novel, but it just feels wrong. And while conflict is the essence of drama, a novel can, for a good portion of its page count, get away without conflict altogether. In fact, I'd say that a lot of my favorite fiction is filled with pages of either mood or interesting information. Yes, I could go ahead and write the novel like I might write a screenplay or stageplay, but then I wonder, What would be the point? Isn't the idea to write, you know, a novel?

Okay, 'nuff ranting for now. I gotta try and get these last hundred words down.