Back to basics

As a writing team, River and I have a love-hate relationship with technology. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that technology has a love-hate relationship with us. Using Google Docs to share scripts and comments is pretty integral to our process, and certainly being able to look up an obscure fact about one of the Slavic gods in the middle of a writing meeting has allowed us to track down some very cool things about the story we're writing.

Of course, on the other hand...well. Let's just say that sometimes we can get hung up in the details and lose sight of the bigger picture. Like, y'know, the plot. So during a long car trip a few weeks ago, we decided that what we really needed was to put the plot down on paper without all the pretty flourishes (like the witty one-liners that we seem to excel at), so we could really see the gaps and what needed to be filled in. By mutual agreement, we vowed to leave the laptops out of this meeting, and to work with Post-It flip chart paper and markers instead, hoping to eventually end up with the whole story up on River's wall.

This conversation led me to a couple of observations:

1. It is probably rather telling that we hadn't done this already. That's not to say that we hadn't talked about the plot before, but the story has drifted quite a bit from our original discussions (mostly in good ways, I think) and we hadn't really updated our mutual expectations accordingly.
   
2. It says something about us that we were really excited by the idea of using the giant post-it notes and markers. I don't think this says anything particularly good about us, mind you, but it does say something.

So this meeting happened on Sunday afternoon, and armed only with giant our wits, giant paper and snacks, we accomplished quite a lot in 3 1/2 hours. In the next day or two, I'll post some photographic evidence. I have to say, my focus on this project is picking back up after a lot of happy distractions over the summer, and I'm feeling quite excited to get back to it!