I just had an ‘Oh‘ moment. You know what they are. That second when you suddenly put two and two together and reach such a blindly obvious four you wonder how you could possibly not have noticed it before.
There’s a storyline I’ve been playing around with in the back of my mind for a while now. Something I want to do with Wizards. But it’s all the result of a particular thing having already happened to one of the characters. And I had no idea how to make it happen. (Like wanting to write the story of a character adjusting to sudden blindness with no idea how they were blinded.) I mean, obviously I could make something up. But a catalysing event that important can’t be arbitrary. It has to be organic to the story, to the world, to the characters. Has to build out of what came before. And I was morosely thinking I might have to write a whole book just to get them there.
And then I was having a shower (best place ever to come up with ideas, I really need to get another waterproof notebook to stick on the wall…) and suddenly my brain just lined the blocks up in my head and rang a bell. Oh.
Because I realised I already had what I needed. I’d built it into the world from the start. I even had the character I needed to push the whole thing over the edge. It was right there. And I was fiddling about and grumbling and…
Now I’m a little annoyed with myself for being an idiot. But still a bit high on the rush of having the answer so the annoyance is a distant thing.
Am now going to distract myself by being brilliant for a while.
platform thing 
Michael Dawson
08/11/2011
Waterproof notebook: it’s called a whiteboard marker and tiles! 🙂
Kandace Mavrick
08/11/2011
There are SO many issues with that idea. Starting with ‘I’m not sure markers would work when the tiles are wet’, middling with ‘it would be much harder to transpose the notes afterwards’ and ending with things that I won’t mention because they would make Rick blush.
Wendy
08/11/2011
I love those moments! I also require some kind of shower text-to-speech device. Wait, speech-to-text. Argh, my brain. Showers and bedtime = best times for writing >_>
Kandace Mavrick
08/11/2011
Oh yeah, what is it about bedtime? You think, ‘Now it is time to get some sleep’ and your brain says, ‘Oh but wait…’ This is why I take my laptop to bed with me. And why I know exactly what Rick sounds like when he’s and muffling screams of frustration and swear words in his pillow.
Also why I spend quite a bit of time in the middle of the night on my couch wrapped in my rocket ship sheets and the glow of backlit keys and the softest light I can coax the screen to use and still be visible. (It doesn’t count as really getting up again if you don’t turn on the lights. Then it’s just a temporary relocation to prevent Rick inventing some way to torture me in retaliation.)
decoy
08/11/2011
Whiteboard markers + tiles. Just saying.
decoy
08/11/2011
So prior comments are not obvious when reading on my phone…
Kandace Mavrick
08/11/2011
Really? You boys don’t foresee problems with the words being, like, rubbed away? Maybe if I tried to write above head-height… Though that might lead to the low-blood-pressure-falling-down thing which is something I’ve been told I’m not supposed to do.
Although I actually have a really funny falling-down-in-the-shower story… but that’s not my story to tell, so I’ll be quiet now. La la la.
decoy
08/11/2011
You could hang a small, removable white board directly under the shower assembly, least likely place to get really wet.
Who’s story is it to tell and why aren’t they? 🙂
Kandace Mavrick
08/11/2011
Ah, but if I tell you whose story it is I will have begun to give the whole thing away. Although perhaps I could prod them into sharing…
A white board is a good idea. But waterproof notebook still better, I think. Then you just tear off the page you were writing on when you get out of the shower. Easy. Plus I have a thing that sticks it to the wall of the shower at a convenient height.
At the old place sometimes people would borrow our shower and leave me messages or art work… How would I have been able to preserve these priceless moments of hilarity if they were created in a more ephemeral medium?
(On an unrelated note, WordPress thinks you’re from France. I think WordPress is hilarious.)
decoy
08/11/2011
“WordPress thinks you’re from France”
I sort of, kind of, am in France for given values of France.
Kandace Mavrick
08/11/2011
“for given values of France”
Wow. There are just so many different places I could take that sentence. I am just going to sit here and… snicker for a while.
arkayspark
08/11/2011
But I think how clever (of your unconscious writing brain) for you to already have all that preparation done for you to slide right to your crisis without (much) re-writing!
Kandace Mavrick
08/11/2011
No rewriting. That’s the astonishing thing. Every time it happens I start giving my subconscious mind stern looks and it starts look for things to hide behind. Honestly, the things it gets up to when I’m not paying attention. I swear, I’m walking around thinking, “I have no plot ARGH, no plot!” and it’s quietly organising the whole thing in the background.
And then there’s this quiet cough from somewhere behind my left ear and it points and… there the plot is. All laid out. All the details already written in, tiny piece by tiny piece layered through everything I’ve already written. And I stomp around for the next three days muttering, “Well you could have told me.”