Human beings like to get out and do stuff. Our characters seem to be perennially on the go. But what if they couldn’t?
Snowed in. Stuck without transport. Marooned on an island, or an alien planet. [Polymath, by Brunner, is a tale of building civilization from scratch on the wrong planet.] Hiding from bombs, or searchers, or monsters, or a pandemic. [want to see some fun stuff by shut-in people? check out Off The Walls, from the Getty Museum. They ran a contest during the pandemic to recreate famous artworks with everyday items.]
Crowded in somewhere with a bunch of other people driving you nuts, or totally alone on one’s own resources.
How do your characters react when involuntarily idle? Are they creative, grumpy, hibernating? If they lack resources to survive, how do they make do?
Write a scene where your characters can’t go anywhere. Let us know why, and show how they cope, or don’t.
DaKoWriMo Goals (Final Thursday)
babushka -Colorado Open Thread Mondays until ColoTim is back; posted successfully so far - 2/2
bonetti - check stuff off ToDo list: slow but solid 20(ish) fundamental underlying tasks done - 1/26
dconrad - planned out a dozen chapters, new ideas for plotting! 2/2
Mercy Ormont - "rewrite & try to finish memoir, Thirty-Nine Years On The Street." -on the backburner ‘til next week 1/19.
mettle fatigue - "make progress, any kind"- “only a little progress made but pleased with that amt and made some unexpected discoveries about the type of material in the process” 1/31.
NoBlinkers - 20k more words: 4k so far .. plus an idea…!!! -1/19
not a lamb - write at least 5 minutes a day- wrote a diary, staying on schedule 1/19.
quarkstomper — continuing Dark Redemption- bogged down in excellent morass hope to publish next chapter next week. 2/2
RiveroftheWest - add factoids, 4 paintings & a doz. sketches illustrating WIP- refined 2 paintings, started a third, 2 ink sketches. 2/2
ThurzdaysChild - “fit in weekly writing 'appointment', & spent 2.5-3 hours working on it each Thursday in Jan” - 1/26
wandering in samsara - aiming for 5 min/day on rough draft of third quarter of WIP, logjam broken 1/19, completed a skeletal draft of “the dreaded third quarter” 1/26
Write On! will be a regular Thursday night diary (8 pm Eastern, 5 pm Pacific) until it isn’t.
Before signing a contract with any agent or publisher, please be sure to check them out on Preditors and Editors, Absolute Write and/or Writer Beware.
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