Next steps

I finished Writing the Breakout Novel over the weekend. Excellent book, lots of good advice. I have even made lots of notes and dreamed up several new story elements while I read it, even before moving on to the workbook.

And now I’m scared. There’s a lot involved. I have never actually written a whole book before. Can I pull this off?

Tension and conflict on every page. That’s one of the first “rules” mentioned in the book. Every page? Really? I don’t have that. Actually, I have more of it than I realized (I’ve been doing a little rereading), but I don’t have it on every page. In a lot of places, I can see where I can add it in. In some places, I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do.

I am wavering back and forth. I have about 60,000 handwritten words on this story already. And I think I might need to just start over from the beginning. But I think there are good bits. So what to do?

Pardon me while I talk out loud here in a sense. I wonder if it would be useful to go through what I’ve already written and do a synopsis of it, marking what I find to be the really good bits? And then I can do a synopsis for the ending so I know what exactly I want to do and then do the rewrite.

Wow! I think this is actually a really good plan! It’s the best of both worlds, and I am very, very excited. (Oh yes, the writer said “very, very.” Yes, she did. And she’s standing by it.)

I wish I could start now. But I have a long weekend away coming up. We’re leaving Thursday, and I have six million things to do. So I don’t actually have time to do what I want to do. Which is completely driving up the craving to do it.

I am going to gather my handwritten pages and a notebook and pen and set them next to the bed so that I at least have a symbolic start. And then I’m going to really make this work!

Thank you, dear readers, for being here as I worked through this idea. I shall definitely keep you posted…

And one last note…next week, because of the long weekend, I will probably be doing my post on Thursday rather than Tuesday. Stay tuned!