Starting something new

I’ll admit it, things are tough at the moment. I’m studying full-time on a course where we (the students) are not getting as much support as we might hope for, my funding has been cut and the workload is huge. This doesn’t leave a lot of time for writing and it means my motivation levels are pretty low. The last thing I wrote (not counting essays and the like) was the Christmas episode of New Dawns and that was finished in November!

So, how do I get back into the swing of things? Notes. Lots and lots of notes. I am forever writing notes about story ideas. This is how I start my stories, sometimes with a note as short as a word or two and sometimes with a note several hundred words long. Then I pick one (or two) and add more and more detail to the notes until I reach a point where I just have to start writing it.

Now, it is true, the finished story often bares only a passinbg resemblance to the original notes but they give me a starting point – a feel for the story’s shape if nothing else. All I need to do now is pick a couple of my notes and start expanding on them – another story for the Carters? New Dawns, Season Two? A detective novel? Sci-fi? Who knows?