Hey, amid these crazy days, I forgot to mention here that I finished a rough first draft of the new novel. I actually finished on March 14, and mentioned it on Twitter, but I wanted to talk a little bit about what was different this time.

First, the draft took me just over two months from start to finish, which is remarkably fast for me. Granted, this is a much shorter novel than my usual. It’s about 63,000 words right now and I expect it to be under 80,000 when I’m done. This is good, because I wanted to try to write a shorter novel. (For comparison, The Red was around 118,000 words.) Also, the story is near future and set on Earth, so I didn’t have to do as much world building as in the Inverted Frontier novels. That let me write faster.

But the main factor that kept me writing at a steady pace was all the prep work I did in December and early January. I wanted to try an entirely new writing method this time around, so I picked up a copy of John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller and worked through all the exercises up to, but not including, the “scene weave.”

By this point, I knew a lot about the story. So instead of the “scene weave,” I put together an event outline, laying things out in rough chapters that included everything I could think of that might happen, including bits of dialog.

I write in Nisus Writer Pro, which lets me maintain a table of contents in the sidebar. Each section was titled with a super-short description of events which then appeared in the sidebar. This let me view the outline in summary form, while also being able to easily move from section to section.

Right now, this novel is written from a single point of view, but I found it helpful to also outline what was happening offscreen, especially with the antagonist, just to keep things clear in my head. I ended up numbering the sections I intended to write, using automatic numbers, while indicating the offscreen sections with an arrow, just to avoid confusion.

When I started writing the actual chapters, I devoted a week just to the opening, wanting to get that right because it sets the mood for the rest of the novel. After that, my goal was to write at least a thousand words a day — and because of the detailed outline, I mostly succeeded. I had a couple of days in the middle when I didn’t make my goal, and near the end things slowed down for a bit. But I re-outlined the final confrontation, and after that, I made swift progress.

There is a lot of revision to do. I intended to take a couple days off to catch up on other obligations before starting the next draft, but two days has turned into five and I still haven’t gone back to it. But I will soon. If not today, then tomorrow.

Posted on: Friday, March 20th, 2020 at 8:00 am
Categories: Writing.