A page a day cont'd

Ok, so what I meant to say last week was that I was going to write a page a day starting next week, which would mean starting this week. Now, I did in fact write a little something for my creative writing class but it is by no means in my opinion a good or necessarily complete story. But I felt it was better than my first submitted story though mostly because it seems a lot more emotional. I only fear that it may have turned a little too sappy and that may turn off a few readers.

It's a little funny how this story turned about. It came from two previous incarnations. The first one was simply a hitchhiker getting into a car and planning on robbing the man who picked him up. For some reason or another, it didn't turn out that well, perhaps I was being a little too ambitious since I wanted the driver to be some serial killer too. The tables were turned but I couldn't figure out a way of including dialogue and a few scenes and confining it within 10 pages. It could be done except that I'm a dialogue heavy person. I don't overly visual and emotional senses that well. I can describe the gist of things concisely but that's as far as I'll go (perhaps something I could work on in the future).

The second iteration of the story was basically about a man/teenager who was driving down a road and getting chased by a phantom car. Now this is the story that I really wanted to write but came with a few problems for me. 1: It sounded too much like Sleepy Hollow with Duel. I'm the kind of guy that likes an original idea and I felt that it may be a bit derivative on my part. 2: I couldn't figure out a decent reason why someone would drive down a haunted piece of road besides being in a hurry. Stories that have a supernatural element to it seem to foreshadow or hint at the idea for paranormal very early on. I didn't find the phantom camaro too scary because either the protagonist wouldn't know about the fact and percieve the threat as an angry driver, or he would be a complete chicken. As a complete chicken, he wouldn't drive down the road in the first place (I've thought about a truth or dare situation, maybe it could work if handled correctly) and by the protagonist not knowing, I lose a valuable expositional device that would otherwise seem to come out of nowhere for the ghost(since I am a newbie writer, I can't think of another way).

The third scenario is very much like the Phantom car but without the supernatural. It dealt with a teenager running away from a hellhole of a house and driving to see his father. This part of the story was part of my phantom car story, but I felt the drama behind the main character running away was better suited towards a slightly more dramatic piece. He meets his dad at a gas station much to his surprise and spends a lot of valuable father and son time. He heads back home and finally discovers why his mother is such a bitch and why his parents are divorced, a fact that I will not divulge here because I felt it was too subtle in my piece. Or perhaps a little unrealistic of the characters. But hey, that's why I was taking the class, to get constructive criticism.

So this leaves me with a lesson in storytelling, or it should. Find a reason for your character's actions. My first two story ideas weren't particularly strong with character I felt. A guy whose afraid of ghosts wouldn't drive down a spooky road if he could help it nor would a cunning thief be so stupid to rob from a murderer.

*Actually, now that I've written these things down, I think I got another burst of an idea for the first two. I'll go over the previous ones and hopefully find the story I meant to write with each one. Lesson 2, write down all ideas good or bad and when you get writer's block (like what I had just about now) write down the reasons why the characters and the piece doesn't work. I think you will be surprised at the results.