Ok, so it has been a very busy week for me; first, the London Book Fair, and then the attempted catch up of yesterday and today. I will not go in to more detail on the LBF; that has been amply covered in the three reports I produced on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
Now, this being the first progress update, I should inform you just how I am going about writing this novel. My initial plan was to write at least 2000 words per day, five days a week. For those of you mathematically disinclined that makes 10,000 words a week. Unfortunately, a more realistic number is 6,000-7,000. If you also consider the amount of time I spend on research and editing (which is a lot), I think that is about fair. Bear in mind that when writing my dissertation I managed 10,000 words in roughly a month. So basically, I am writing just less than 1 dissertation a week... and probably doing about as much research too. Oh, to be a student again!
Happily, this week I hit a number of milestones. From the purely physical word count, I finally hit 50,000 words, which is roughly half of my target word count for this novel. Secondly, I managed to blast through a major plot point that was causing me a major headache.
Having finally burst through this obstacle, last night I went on a scribbling rampage - a marathon 14-hour writing session! It was all about one particular character, Gorran. On paper, his motivation is simple... he’s one of the “good guys” but, in reality, why does he act in this way? Why are nice people, nice? What is it that allows them to drift away from the usual selfish state of nature? I am not going to reveal his whole character here, more on him when I introduce him properly!
Now, back to the process; I had the whole plot sketched out in a notebook. This plan I transferred to the word document that contains the whole story. Here I divided the plot into chapters, and then made a list of bullet points under each chapter heading, stating what it was I wanted to have happen in that particular timeframe. When I got to writing about that part, I would simply “flesh out” the bullet points into proper prose, including descriptions, dialogue, etc. This planning process has served me well, however this was proving to be too simplistic for me. Basically the story had become one scene leading to another, and at times it felt far too disconnected. I had to go back often to introduce new characters, or to write someone into a particular part so that later subplots made sense.
During the marathon session last night I completely recreated the plan and made it far more versatile. I began with a flow chart of the plot, noting under each section just what was meant to happen. I then broke out my character overview (a sheet that stated everything that has happened, or is going to happen to a particular character) and added that info to the chart.
From here I was able to create a more detailed character overview which broke down their “life” in the story, showing just what it was they are doing at any particular time. I then created a time line and made sure that everything made sense chronologically (some didn’t).
And from these basic notes, comes the story. Simples!
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