Day 67: Varying Degrees of Storytelling

I’m five episodes into Netflix’s “The Beast in Me” with Claire Danes. It’s really good. She’s such a remarkable actress. She hasn’t had work done which helps with her acting.

I’m also listening to an audiobook, “The Night Circus” by Erin Morgenstern. I rarely listen to fiction books but when we were at the happy hour to celebrate Ryan’s certification one of the people he works with asked if I’d read that book. I told her I hadn’t. She said, “Well it’s like you stepped out of one of my favorite novels.”. I was wearing black slacks, a black and white sweater and a red scarf. She gave me a brief description of the book and the next day I used one of my three credits on it.

It’s really good. But, there are a lot of characters. It’s also depicted over a wide range of time and bounces between the periods which throws me a bit at the start of each chapter.

Ever since starting this 365+ day of writing challenge I’ve been looking at the structures and format of books and shows differently. Instead of paying attention solely to the plot, I’m trying to figure out how and when the writer decides to change scenes.

It’s making me think I might need to stick to plans to write non-fiction.

And that I’ll also need to take a course or workshop on how to construct a book.

“Start Writing Your Book Today” by Morgan Gist MacDonald is also in my Audible library. I got halfway through it one time then tabled it for about 6 months. I restarted it a couple weeks into the daily blog posts and it’s been beneficial.

Likely the first thing that every class, workshop, instructor, coach is going to advise is to write daily…which is what I’m doing.

I’ve had an idea for a fiction book for a few years now but again, trying to keep up with a cast of characters and not overwhelm the reader seems like a daunting process.

Back to the Claire Dane’s miniseries. She’s a best selling author who wrote a memoir. She’s supposed to be writing another book and is 2 years in with not much progress. Then a bunch of things happen in the plot. But it got me thinking about how sometimes an artists body of work can be a couple of books, paintings, movies, etc. To get to expert level they have to put thousands and thousands of hours in. But all that practice and fine tuning and testing and playing could result in just a couple of pieces of finished work. It’s wild to think about.

Because society tells us that if we aren’t constantly producing then we are lazy. Things done well take time. Sometimes it doesn’t take time though. Just depends on who is doing what and how quickly they can remove obstacles and distractions while also creating from a place of non-ego. I think that might be the secret. Creating for the sake of creating. Then melding it into brilliance.

Family movie night starts in 65 minutes so I’m going to get another episode in.