It’s always great ticking off milestones – setting a target and then knocking it off. On the 12th August I did just that by completing the first draft of my novel ‘The Bezerker’. It got tough at some points, and was a breeze at others. I had big scenes that I knew about right from the start that I couldn’t wait to write and other scenes that just popped in out of the blue and needed some more thinking.
STRATEGY:
With my last novel, Elite:And Here The Wheel I wrote a lot of detail about the plot of the story. I ended up with a 30 page treatment of the events of the book, this that happened, then that happened, followed by this. Basically, an IKEA guide to build a book, but also with flashy bits of dialogue and events that I knew of before hand. Then I simply expanded the 30 pages to 400 odd pages.
This time however I followed a different strategy. While I plotted out the main points so I knew what was happening and when, each scene only got a few sentences of instruction. Instead the effort went into ‘designing’ the characters and locations. This all added up to about 45 pages of planning documentation – more effort but focused differently.
This allowed me to work a bit differently, a bit more organically. I’d start a new scene with my few sentences of instruction and the ‘scene number’. I’d look up my scene number and immediately I’d have the sights, sounds, tastes, smells and sensations of that environment, so I could immediately begin writing with a sense of place.
This allowed the story to develop on its own a little bit, the scene could take on a life of its own. Events that screwed over my protagonists could occur that led to new scenes to get them out of it. This lead to a different story telling process and it was quite fun.
STATS:
After a draft is done I like to look back at a few of the stats to see how reality compares to the plan:
The most interesting stat there is my words per day. I planned to write 1,000 words a day. While I started out strongly, life and life related activities began to take up more time near the end and some days I didn’t write at all. Overall I’m happy with my daily amount – it was pretty close.
THE NEXT STEP:
A break! I have some other projects to tidy up, including writing projects. I plan to get back to this novel in September to start the editing process.