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!

Shoring up the foundations

I am reworking Blood of the Mist. Not rewriting it, not doing revisions. Reworking it. From the beginning. Sigh…

It is necessary. The story needs it. This is a really good story idea, so it deserves everything I can put into it. But there’s a lot of the work I’ve done so far that is going to get thrown out. Well, probably just tucked away in a box somewhere, but it will be thrown out of the story.

Hard as that is, I can feel that it’s the right thing to be doing. I really need more depth in my planning, more knowledge about my characters and their motivations, more of a vision of my world. I didn’t spend nearly enough time doing the pre-writing stuff. I was getting ready for NaNoWriMo, so I was in a rush, especially because I didn’t start planning until mid-October. Definitely not enough time. And so here I am, practically starting over because of my rush job last Fall.

It’s really okay, though. All of the things I’ve written so far are useful, even if they don’t end up in the final version. They’ve led me closer to knowing what the story is going to be. I have a clearer idea of what the story needs. This is all good stuff, so I really can’t consider what I’ve done so far as wasted time. But it is time to move forward again.

Right now, I am using some of the exercises out of Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (one of the writing tools I bought with my stimulus check) to help me delve more deeply into my characters and my plot layers. I think working through these, taking the time to actually do the exercises instead of just reading through a few of them, is going to lead me to a much better story, so even though I am a little frustrated, what I am doing now is going to end up being time well spent. Now, I think I’ll get back to spending it.