OUAN603 - Ten Thousand Words

At around mid April I hit the ten thousand word mark on the story aspect of my project. This was reached through a couple of concentrated efforts of converting my ideas and story notes into a steady continuation of the story. At this point I feel like I've made some steady progress, and although I haven't hit the point that I wanted to be at around this time [twenty thousand words] I still feel that I was able to overcome a difficult hurdle in the process: the beginning of the story.

Before I had started writing I was concerned I would face blocks when trying to put words on the page but I have found that as long as I set goals for each chapter in terms of what action, dialogue and development that I want to occur within the larger intention for the story, then the writing comes more easily and flows more steadily than the attempts I have made to write the story as it goes along.

It was only when I approached the ten thousand I had the entire story more or less plotted out, up until this point I was still making some quite major changes to the plot and the sequence of events that take place. One of the hardest parts was thinking about character motivations and asking the question 'why?' regarding certain events in the story. At this point I can start modifying any parts that don't comply with my overarching synopsis and this plotting out of the story has now giving me the information I need to continue writing with the knowledge whether each event, action, or piece of dialogue makes sense in the bigger story. I have also made sure to write brief summaries of characters to make sure they fill their roles within the story and made some notes about major events in the story bible I've been maintaining throughout the writing process. Interestingly, the story bible itself is around six thousand words long with notes, and my current story is ten thousand - I think that tells me that during my process I have to make notes quite consistently to be able to write a coherent story that flows without error. It also gives me piece of mind in that I have an updated guide to the plot and the story that I'm telling overall. Finally, the story bible also details different sequences in terms of the animations set within the story world, scripts and other story arcs that can be used for the graphic novel for example.