My Current Work-in-Progress And My Pinterest Boards For It!

It’s been a minute since I last posted. I had a huge assignment due this past week and had to focus all my attention on that for obvious reasons, but I am done now! Genuinely was the biggest assignment I have ever worked on, it ended up being around 83 pages which is wild. Only a 3,500 word essay but so much other stuff that took a lot of work to put together. So, because I have spent all week thinking about university, I figure I will write about it now too.

Currently, I’m in my Master’s for Creative Writing, and I have a 15,000 word short story due in September that I’m currently working on. This seemed really daunting at first, but during my undergrad I had to write an 8,000 short story and I was right on the word count at the end of it. I also kept saying I wish I had more words. And this story is even more convoluted and long so I feel like I will definitely have the exact same problem again. Unless I can plan it out better this time.

My undergrad project was well planned out. I spent the first term, which is essentially 4ish months, plotting it out and planning everything surrounding my characters and plot. However, this project allows me a lot more time as it’s due in September rather than March. So, theoretically, it should be better plotted. 

The first half of my Master’s program was dedicated to working out the story, fine-tuning the details and finding a good starting point. I have only written about 1,500 words at this point in time. However, this next semester is more so dedicated to writing and rewriting, so I will be making a lot more progress on the word count rather than figuring out every minute detail. 

My process for planning and writing stories has really changed as time has gone on. I used to just start with a brief idea, or vague notion of character or plot and just see where I ended up. Now, I make up what I’ve been calling a plot breakdown. When I was writing my undergrad final project, I typed up a long generalized description of everything that would happen in the story and then in a new document I chopped up the plot and added some details in bullet points beneath. I had this document next to me while I was writing to guide me on what I was doing, what I needed to say, and what I needed to write. I found that when I was writing without doing that I was getting lost, forgetting key plot details, and generally just straying off track.

Now, with a project this big, that is definitely still the plan. If you looked at my Google Docs folder you would find about 9 documents all with information very important to the story I’m writing. 

The basis of the story started over the summer. I had submitted my application to the program and knew I needed to be gearing up to take on a large project so I was thinking about what I wanted to write. I had also just finished writing a vampire story. I love vampires, but I knew I wanted to do something a little different but still very horror/gothic. At the time I was listening to a lot of Creeper’s newest album which was essentially a sort of twisted love story between a vampire and a man and I realized I really wanted to write a love story. I envisioned this very theatrical aesthetic, I was thinking of a very Las Vegas runaway bride campy sort of vampiric love story but I had yet to really think about it. 

Over the summer I went backpacking with some friends from university and in Croatia we found a spot along the sea that was fairly secluded to swim. I, unfortunately, was not able to get into the water at the time and had to sit on the sidelines while everyone else had fun. So, while I was sitting there I decided to try and think about my monster story a little bit more. I thought that the place we were sitting was a perfect setting for my story, and that I had never written an aquatic monster before. One of my favorite movies is The Shape of Water, which not everybody seems to understand, but I love Guillermo del Toro’s work, he really is a modern gothic filmmaker. 

So, I started to think about this. I thought of a woman brought to a foreign coastline town with a man who she was in the steps of being engaged to, but she was not very interested in any of it. And I envisioned her meeting this aquatic sort of monster on the rocks of the coastline. This is where I started to lose the love aspect I started out with. While I envisioned this woman and this monster I also thought that making her fiance figure nefarious would be an excellent foil. After all, who really is the monster? 

This was when I started to think more about my main female character and my distaste for love triangles. I started to envision her as being ambitious, angry, someone who was fed up with her lot in life. Someone who was power hungry but had no real means to ever grab any. 

So, the basic plot, themes, and setting of the story is this:

This was what I showed to my lecturer and the other people in my program. I had most of the story thought up but I was really struggling with the ending. I had created a woman who was a bit horrible and set her up to be with either this monster or this man.

I needed a big Act 3, the big set piece of the whole story. I don’t want to share exactly what that is until I have it finalized but it is definitely going to be bloody. In a monster story everybody is the monster and there will be no love triangle. I will definitely talk about this more in detail as I write it, maybe I’ll do a breakdown of each act and what is going on within them. The plot is still kind of a moving figure so I'll share more when I have my plot breakdown done!

In other aspects of the writing process character was also incredibly important, especially character design. I'll show a few of my Pinterest boards to share my process.

I envisioned two different forms for the monster to kind of humanize him or to make him more 'desirable'. That was definitely essential to the idea of the female character being drawn to monstrosity, but I didn't just want to make him just a blue guy or something as a more human version, I wanted there to still be aspects of monstrousness. My lecturer agreed that the monstrousness was very important and to lean into that aspect of it. So the second board highlights a lot of individual features that I will take into account for my descriptor rather than a whole being. The first board is also mostly drawing from old monster movies. I specifically searched for the movie the image on the top right was take  from as I remember watching clips of old monster movies with my cousin and seeing that and being kind of freaked out by it.  My story pulls a lot from cinema so a lot of these movies I have pulled pictures from are on my to be watched list as I try to nail down the vibe. Again, all of these images merely serve as inspiration as I try to design my version.

In terms of my female character's board, I started at first by finding a lot of pulp horror art which I love that I felt envisioned the vibe but then as the image of a 50's-esque time period came I started to look at more of the silhouettes from the time period to get some inspiration. I've also been watching a lot of movies from close to the time period, everyone should watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes genuinely was such a fun watch.

I like to joke that I never have to do any research because everything I write is made-up and pulled straight from my head, but I guess I actually do a lot of research I just never think of it like that. I feel like I'm just making a Pinterest board, watching movies, and reading books but all of that is research. I ordered Wuthering Heights because my lecturer suggested it due to some narrative similarities.

I'll make a blog post breaking down the plot more in-depth and talk more about the three act structure I chose to use for it, I just think that this post is long already and that I wanted to mostly share a general idea and my process first. This is already becoming a very complicated story with a lot of moving parts so I think it would be helpful to devote a post explaining each act and my thought process behind that. I will probably post my 1,500 word excerpt later this week as well, to give an idea of what I'm doing and my writing style. Thanks for reading if you made it this far, kind of a lengthier post from me!