Thursday, December 07, 2006

'Inter Vivos' and Gunman story


I have been thinking about my NaNoWriMo novel, Inter Vivos. I know that the month is over, but I really liked the characters and story premise that I created, so I'm going to continue on with it, in the hope of completing a first draft by April. When writing prose, I always get stuck at the point when my characters need to travel from one place to another. I find it really hard to get them from point A to point B. I want my characters to go from the mental institution to one of my other characters' house, but I feel like I need to document the journey there. So they are now stuck, having just escaped from the asylum, and are standing there, tapping their feet impatiently at me (like Sonic the Hedgehog used to do if you made him stand still too long). I think that as I'm currently writing it in first person, I can skim all the boring details and have my narrator be retrospective on the trip so, "before we knew it we were there". It's annoying, because I know pretty much how the whole story is going to be mapped out, apart from the 'travelling' bits. Grr!

Have just written my Momentum homework, for which we had to take a news story and come up with a couple of scenes and some characters. I've taken a story about a man in Germany who went back to his old school, shot some kids and then killed himself. I've called the gun man Shaun (taken from Shaun of the Dead there folks!), and have given him a love affair with his former teacher, Jess. When things start to go wrong, he finds himself losing control and the only way he feels he can regain some control is to go into the school with a gun. When he accidentally kills one of the students, he then kills himself (leaving poor old Jess to deal with the mess). I'm not sure if I will try to develop this into a full-blown play (I actually see it in my head as a TV drama), but I quite liked my character Jess - she's a very strong woman, very moralistic, very sensible, but incredible lonely, and she does really connect with Shaun. So we'll see where it goes.

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