Well, I am feeling quite accomplished today. I got the two stories done that I had planned on. They’re short ones, about 800 words each, but that’s okay. The more important thing for me, in writing these stories about my characters’ backgrounds, is to fine tune my understanding of them. To delve into their pasts for key moments that helped shape them. And in this regard, whether the story is 700 words or 4000 (actually haven’t written any that long this month :-)) is not as relevant as whether it helps deepen my perception of the character. (Or so I keep telling myself as I settle into writing 800 word stories most days…)

Even though I had given myself this structure for the month of writing  (primarily) background stories for my novel’s characters, I was sort of intending on using the prompts to write those stories. That hasn’t worked out so far, even though I quite like the prompts that are being posted. I keep getting ideas for the different characters’ stories and going with those instead. It’s, of course, a nice problem to have — too many possible ideas, but I like using prompts coming from someone else because they can stretch one as a writer in a way that one wouldn’t choose to on one’s own. So. I think I’ll be going back to some of those prompts.