Yesterday & Today: 18th June

It might be a shade controversial, but it’s possible to make writing ‘easy’. Certainly that’s how coming back to ‘Z’ felt as I rattled off another chunk yesterday.

Okay, if not ‘easy’ then ‘easier’…

It’s all about process, and for ‘Z’ I took an entirely different process to my normal one.

1 – Forgetting about plot, I tried to define a group of characters in whom I could be interested and felt had stories I might want to tell. I started with six and ended up with fourteen (both major and minor).

2 – Then I worked on the interactions between each, the elements of their stories that needed telling, and worked out a simple chronological timeline for each character.

3 – Then I made a list (a long list!) of all the plot points from step 2 plus any other elements from their characters in step 1 which would need to be covered by either action or description. (In truth steps 2 and 3 were a little iterative.)

4 – I then sequenced the nearly 400 plot points into a list based on how I thought the narrative should unfold.

My draft document started therefore, with a long list. The ‘simple’ part is that all I have to do is to write one of the plot points, then move onto the next. I know the story is coherent, so I only have to worry about exposition, dialogue, description. Write one, move on to the next.

Inevitably there are some groupings – i.e. five consecutive plot points might be about the same character / scene / relationship – so I can flex the order in which I cover them when writing.

Essentially I already have the novel, I’m just expanding about 2,000 words to 80,000…

Having said all that, I still remain to be convinced that I believe in the story enough to make it through to the end (or that I’ll use this process again in the future). Come back after about 20,000 words and I’ll have a better idea!

So, today? Well, you guess…

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