Twice a summer, I go up to my family's cabin to have some quiet in which I can write. I go once with my writer group for three total days, then again by myself for four. This year, the group and I went up during June, with my personal one finishing up this past Saturday. This year's efforts yielded about 76,000 words in a new project that I started with the group in June. I have a plan of writing five novellas, with the major storyline weaving through all of them, then culminating in a final, larger novella/short novel that puts all of the pieces together. The goal is to have a slightly different reading experience, one where there's a sense of familiarity and interconnectedness with hints of a broader world. (I wrote about its inception here, so feel free to check that out.) So far, I have completed three of the five novellas. These are each twelve chapters long with an "after credits" sting in the form of an epilogue. This isn't just a pop-culture reference to what the Marvel Cinematic Universe does--I'm specifically thinking of how the stories in the MCU interconnect, influence each other, and work in tandem. Though the MCU has its share of flaws (which, I hope, I'm not emulating), it has some extraordinary payoffs (particularly in Endgame) that make for some remarkable storytelling. However, to get there, it has taken over a decade and twenty-plus movies. I don't have that kind of patience, so I'm trying it out this way. I like to worldbuild quite a bit before launching into a project. I create my WikiDpad (highly recommended software, by the way--once you get through the rather unintuitive learning curve, it's a great asset) of the world, tossing in images that I've found that are inspirational or similar to what I have in mind. I jot down how the magic system works, what the politics is, how religion affects the world, and anything else that strikes my fancy. For this project (tentatively called The Shadowed World, but it isn't as grim or dark as a name like that implies, so I'm sure I'll change it), I had to have an immense amount of pre-writing planning. Normally, I sit down with a notepad, a pen, and an idea. I write out what the character wants (I try to focus on the character as much as possible, a misstep I made in Raleigh House, my Shakespeare MacGuffin book, and part of the reason why I didn't think too highly of my efforts on that one), what the antagonist wants, and any other important characters. I get the characters' goals to interfere with each other as much as possible. Then I turn to my notecards and write down what each chapter has happen in it, checking off the goals that I wrote on the notepad. Once all of those goals are taken care of, my story is essentially outlined. I can look at the notecards and estimate how long the story will be (most of my chapters are between 1,700 and 3,000, so I usually go with about 2,200 words per chapter and multiply that by how many notecards I have). That process wasn't going to work for this one. For one thing, I was working on it during the gaps at the end of the school year, which is much easier to do on my computer than carrying around a bunch of notecards. Secondly, the world was so new to me, I needed my wiki almost constantly--which, again, is on the computer. Not only that, but I'm always looking for new (and, I hope, more efficient) ways to outline a story. At LTUE 2019, I went to a panel that talked about how to enhance my outlining process. It was…unintuitive, though I could see why the writer did what she did. Additionally, she has written quite a few books in relatively little time, which shows that her process can work (for her, at last). Don't forget, I still hate revisions, so the idea of working more carefully through the story beforehand--of making better outlines--is appealing, as it lessens how much I have to revise later on. So, for all of these reasons, I decided to try a new format for my outline. I opened up an Excel spreadsheet (not a Google Sheet, since, of the two, I'd much rather work with something that isn't online-dependent and works more reliably…plus I pay for the 365 subscription, so I should at least get my money's worth, ya?) and, using my newly-developed love of Dungeons and Dragons, I created a grid that gave me ways of generating unique characteristics that still revolve around the world I made. This gave me a quick way to randomly throw possibilities together (I used a d8 and whatever number I got, that character gained that specific attribute), which I then modified and massaged as necessary. It provided a chance to make a lot of characters really quickly, and from them I went through and selected those whose characteristics most interested me. As I had invented four new races to go along with the humans on this world, I made sure that I had one representative from each as the protagonist of each novella. I figured this would give readers (plural, because maybe two people will ever read it) a sense of the different textures and points of view, while also giving me diverse ways of telling the stories. Then I had to set out what each character's arc was, with a separate sheet for the individual, just to keep it easy. I color-coded them so that, at a glance, I could tell how each one was connected to what I had. Then I made a fresh sheet that has twelve cells set aside for each chapter. This took the place of the notecards, giving me a clear idea of what I wanted to accomplish in each one. As I worked on them--and there were a lot of rewrites at this stage--I tried to include important characters and overlap with bolding, italics, and notes to myself. I repeated this process for all five of the novellas. During this process, I had to ensure that there was that aforementioned overlap--after all, the point of telling the story this way is to make it feel like there's a cohesive, unified world. To that end, I created a sheet with the story connections. Each character has four (minimum) touchpoints with every other character. For example, Zelkie starts off her book trying to pickpocket someone in a crowded city street. Zelkie fails, in part because the would-be victim notices her. Zelkie's target is the main character of the fourth novella, and one of her experiences is noticing that she's almost pickpocketed by a strange little creature. The reader (I hope) will recognize that as Zelkie, though for the other character, it's just one thing that happens during her day among many others.
Because of that ever-increasing complexity, chronology became important to me. To that end, I created another sheet that, again using the color-coding I'd set up, showed me where and when each major event happens to each character. This prevented me from having a character show up in one place when they should have been somewhere else at the same time, or travel too fast from one point to another. Interestingly (to me, at least), I wasn't able to really conceptualize what this sheet would look like until I had written the first novella. Zelkie's story--written in its entirety during my first retreat with my group--ended up being the chronological backbone of the story. This made sense to me, because I was able to consider what I'd written as official canon, thereby giving me something to hang the rest of the stories on. During the month between my retreats, I dabbled with the second novella. I was hoping to finish it during that sabbatical, but I ended up only completing five or six chapters before I returned to the cabin. As a result, I wrote the ending of that second book during the first day of my retreat, then dedicated the remaining three days to finishing the third novella. I've only been home three days or so, meaning I haven't bothered trying to start the fourth novella yet, in part because I'm doing a different project (this one for school) that's using up a lot of time. Oh, and I'm writing this thing, instead. In terms of the actual writing process, this is one of my least productive retreats as far as word count goes. This isn't necessarily a bad thing--I needed to get a certain number of chapters done (I finished 19, I think) rather than just pound out a bunch of words, as I've needed to in other years. But what was frustrating was an unexpected confluence of results. See, I'm trying to give each novella its own narrative texture. Book I has a character that kind of breaks the fourth wall and has a really dry, egocentric view of the world. I wrote it in first-person present, giving the novella an immediacy that I really liked. Book II is written in a more traditional third-person past, limited omniscient narration voice. This was easy enough to fall back into--one of the reasons it was a good choice when I started this one--and I think is part of the reason I was able to finish the second half of the novella in one day. But this third one…I made the mistake (maybe) of putting it in third-person present. This is hard for me to maintain--combined, I probably spent an entire hour of the retreat deleting a past-tense verb and rewriting it as a present-tense conjugation. The constant errors slowed me down a lot, and one of the reasons I love these retreats is because I get to write consistently, constantly, and fully. I don't have to stop and slow down for anything other than food and a potty break. So the constant editing frustrated me. Oh, and then I woke up part way through the retreat with conjunctivitis--courtesy my oldest kid--and so I had to spend a couple of hours figuring out how to get treatment so that I could beat it quickly and get on with my life. That distraction sucked a couple of hours from my retreat that I never got back. Still, I finished with my goal intact--to complete the third novella--and I just need to figure out how I'm going to put together the next one. So, on balance, I think it was another successful writing summer. |
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