The end of the beginning

“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is, perhaps, the end of the beginning” is one of my most cherished Churchill quotes, and rings very true of the status of Vinland at the moment. Following my foray into the countryside of Dorset last week, I have been surprisingly industrious in working on my novel.

As you know, I met with the editor, Leila Dewji some time ago now, and have since then been refining the plot of the story to be rather more dramatic and less epic in scale. This process is thankfully nearly done, and I will soon be returning to what I enjoy the most anyway – actually writing the book!

I am sure you are getting rather curious about how I actually go about writing the book, I have given many hints over the months of my blogging here, but have never actually gone over the process. To start with, I have my notebook (a tool most good writers will have on their person at any one time) which is filled to the brim with ideas, people that i’ve met, strange situations. Anything really that crosses my overactive mind every single day. I then go through this notebook and take out anything which could be suitable to the plot, and note them all down in another, bigger notebook. This I entitle “Stuff to happen”. 

Example;

• Discover America
• Game of Hnetafel
• Warrior arrives
• Sit in hall eating meal ignoring enfolding drama
• Merchant thrown overboard
• Find prince
• Find natives

As you can see this is pretty basic, just an overview of things that could happen. The next step are the characters, and very unlike the plot these are remarkably organic, beyond some general traits and noting down major events I do not plan them overly much. Instead I go through the “stuff to happen” and apply those events to the characters, or if something especially good needs to happen, I create a suitable character for it to happen to.

Example;

• Erik the Red
• Central character. The reason Vinland succeeds
• Thorvald
• The voice of the warrior spirit
• Leif
• The voice of intelligence and reason

See, even the character overviews I have posted on this blog are more in depth than the notes I followed initially. Now we have the rough story and the characters, we need to turn this into a plot. Therefore I cut the events up into “sections” and arrange these sections into a chronological order. This is what we are left with;

I

• Bjarni finds America
• Bring out the superstitious element
• Make Bjarni appear a coward to his crew

II

• Leif loses to Erik at Hnetafel (Viking chess)
• It is a very close match. Mock anger from Erik to display his pride in the skills of his son.

IV

• Kai arrives
• Sits in hall eating meal ignoring enfolding drama

VI

• Edvin, Rorik and Anneliese arrive
• Edvin thrown overboard by Rorik

Addendum

• Find prince
• Dropped, terrible idea and horrifically cliche.
• Find natives
• ?

But how does this contribute to the finished script? Find out on Thursday!