post-it notes

As busy as I find my life, I'm often in inconvenient situations when inspiration strikes me. Places like class, work, or my internship where it would be considered rude to suddenly whip out a notebook and start scribbling furiously, obviously no longer paying attention to the task at hand. That doesn't tend to go down well, especially at work. This brings about the complication of having inspiration, wanting to record it in some way, but being unable to give it your full developmental attention at the time.

Enter the post-it note.

We use these things all the time at work and they have become indispensable in my writing life. Post-it notes are fantastic, for one, because they don't demand as much from you as a blank notebook page or computer screen does. Post-its don't ask that you be a genius or create a ground-breaking, thought-provoking new idea. All they want from you is to fit what you're writing in a small square. This is also advantageous because you can write as small and as much or as large and as little as pleases you and no one will judge, after all, it's just a post-it! [well okay, if you write small enough to fit an entire novel on a post-it people might judge you a little] Also, how convenient is it to carry around a small square of papers? When I'm in the middle of something or just brainstorming along post-its have become my version of other authors' note cards where I can just jot down thoughts for further perusal at a later time. This does meant that I end up with quite a plethora of post-its but their size makes them wonderful to use in organizing plot points and ideas in a physical sense.

I should write the sales pitches for post-its.

While utilizing many of these sticky place-holders for brainstorming today I made another realization aside from the genius of post-its. As I've rambled on about before, I've been spending most of my writing time on developing my characters as I lack the time blocks to really address the writing of the story itself. I've made a lot of progress and discoveries thus far and I'm really enjoying the process of discovery but today I finally faced up to a huge character whole I've been ignoring. My MC starts the story out with a huge load of emotional and traumatic as well as literal baggage. His mother is recently deceased and everything he goes through in the story will, of course, be colored by the fact that he is now an orphan. The problem was that I hadn't yet addressed how his mother's death would make him, specifically, feel. I had been skirting the issue because I have minimal experience to draw on in order to make this feel real. I guess this is where writers really test themselves, exploring things they've never experienced/know nothing about. I realized today that Sam is somewhat flat to me still because I don't know exactly how he'd respond to the only person he's ever counted on in his life being ripped away from him and leaving him alone. I hadn't even considered what the funeral would have been like for him. Such a massive oversight, if uncorrected, would undermine the entire project!

My personal assignment, then, is to put out my feelers and experiment and explore this tragedy, to jump into it with Sam and see what I find. My brain's been on the fritz so I didn't dare push too far today but I did toy with Sam's perception of the funeral and though what I ended up with is post-it note rough, brief, and raw, I'm already feeling a bit more up to this sad task.