Friday November 6th, 2009

The exercise:

I haven't done much writing today and I'm not sure how much I'll be doing before I go to bed. But that's okay - I worked up a lead for this reason and Friday has been a pretty light writing day for me anyway.

Plus I had an issue to deal with in the story.

Update: Okay, I still managed to surpass the daily target. Barely.

Speaking of which. Your Four Line Friday Prose starter this week is: who's writing this story anyway?

NaNo Word Count: 13,518
NaNo Target: 10,001

Mine:

By the evening of October 31st I had a very good idea of how my NaNoWriMo story was going to play out; I wasn't overly attached to it, but I was confident I knew where it was going.

Late afternoon on November 5th saw everything going pretty much to plan.

But just before bed, on that very same day, I wrote about five lines that introduced a totally new and very different element to the story.

Remind me again: who exactly is in charge of writing this story?

2 comments:

Greg said...

Heh, aren't characters wonderful? You think you know how a story is going to work out, and then two-thirds of the way through one of the characters suddenly refuses to do what you expect to have happen next, and you have to spend the next week working out what happens instead. I know what you mean though, it's always weird to look down at a page and think, "well, I wasn't expecting that!" when you're the writer.
Well done on reaching the target though :)

Who's writing this story anyway?

Miss Addlestone, school-teacher for eight years and counting, was marking journals. In front of her was Stephen's, and she was methodically going through his story, applying red ink to it. Spellings were corrected, grammar was corrected, and towards the end she made some pithy suggestions as to how he might have written the ending better. She was very surprised then when he raised his hand in class, showed her the story, and politely asked, "Who's writing this story anyway?"

Marc said...

Yeah, I'm sure there's something deep and spiritual to be said about merely being the vessel for the story, but it's too early in the day for that.

Great take on the prompt, as always :)