Tag: rough draft

The Rough Draft Is Done!

February 2, 2015 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

Finished my Thirteen Treasures of Britain rough draft the other day. Whew!

Now comes the long march of revisions. I might just totally, utterly, and completely revamp my entire story. So that should be fun.

What’s weird is that I used to outline my stories in the past — lots of note cards, lots of outlines, etc. — and I found it made the process of actually writing to be a bit of a slog. I found that my inspiration kinda died if I did too much outlining and planning ahead of time.

So with Thirteen Treasures of Britain, I totally wrote by the seat of my pants (“pantsers” as they say in NaNo-realm). It was fun to write (until the end, where I had no idea how to finish the story in a non-lame way), but now I’m afraid what I have is a hodgepodge mess of a story that ends in a boring, predictable way. My endings always suck. But this one was particularly sucky because I didn’t have a plan going in.

Does this mean I really need to be a “planner”? Do I have to do a full outline beforehand? Do I need all kinds of character profiles and maps and background-y stuff?

It’s looking more and more like I do. And yet, I’m afraid that I’ll plan everything out and then be completely uninspired when I sit down to write. It’s happened to me before. Will it happen again?

Interestingly, when I was in college learning about screenwriting, it was pretty much hammered into our brains that we had to write treatments (basically, outlines in story-form), beat sheets, and scene summaries. And I never found these kinds of pre-writing tools to be soul-deadening or inspiration-crushing.

My plan for revising The Thirteen Treasures of Britain will include the following:

Rereading my rough draft and marking up sections (basic categories: keep it, toss it, needs work)
Creating a “BORG outline” (trademark: James Scott Bell in Plot & Structure) for a new version of the story
Seeing where I can combine material from my rough draft with my new story outline
Writing a second draft (using the new outline)

For now, I’m letting the draft settle and I’m working on pre-writing for an entirely different story (tentatively titled The Red Tower). I will return to the Thirteen Treasures of Britain rough draft in a week and go from there.

I’m kinda excited. Revision is one of my favorite parts of writing.

Merry Christmas! And a few changes…

December 27, 2014 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

I hold to the old ways of celebrating the twelve days of Christmas. So happy Feast of St. John!

I’m on Christmas break (two whole weeks off from work!), so it’s been a good time for getting writing done. Unfortunately, I’m not where I wanted to be at this point in my novel, but I’m still making headway.

I am getting into the third act of my novel (I trained as a screenwriter, so my lingo is still very much screenwriter-ish), and it’s looking like the story will be shorter than I originally planned. At least in the rough draft stage. It’s possible that when I write the second draft it will get longer again, but for now, I’m looking at a 75,000 word rough draft instead of an 80,000 word one.

This is a bit of a relief, since I’ve been struggling to reach my word count goals each day. Maybe there’s just not enough plot/conflict/urgency in my story (which I’m hoping to fix in the second draft). I’ve also given myself an extended deadline. I’m off from work until January 5, so my new deadline is January 4. This means I’ve got to write about 22,000 words in the next week. This is still ambitious (my average words per day usually hovers around 1,100), but it’s doable.

I’m getting to the point in the rough draft where I can see how much editing needs to be done and I want to skip ahead to the editing/revision phase. It’s hard to focus on writing this crappy rough draft when I’m so desperately itching to focus on writing the much-better second draft. At this point, I just need to Get It Done, but it’s proving a hard task.

I will now rub my NaNoWriMo “Inspiration” sticker for some inspiration. Also, St. John the Evangelist and Apostle (whose feast we celebrate today) is one of the patron saints of authors and booksellers. Maybe his intercession will also help me.

Closing in on 40,000 words…

December 6, 2014 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

I am getting close to the half-way point for my rough draft of 13 Treasures of Britain. I should reach 40,000 words this weekend.

I’m freaking out a little bit that my deadline is December 30 and I’m still not half-way done, but I am also strangely confident.

On the other hand… I have a sinking feeling that I’m suffering from a “main character problem.” To be specific, I’m afraid that I have a flat main character whom the audience won’t care about. My challenge is to find a way to get the audience to care about my Merlin character. Is the “save the cat” thing played out, or do writers still do that?

In a lot of ways, I’ve imagined my version of Merlin to be like a mixture of the Peter Capaldi and Christopher Eccleston versions of Doctor Who. But the first half of the book is mostly Merlin-collecting-things and doing crazy stuff (think: the first half of a Doctor Who episode, where the Doctor travels to another planet and encounters some treacherous situation). In a typical episode of Doctor Who, the emotional stuff usually builds in the second half, particularly when we find out there’s more to the adventure than the Doctor originally thought.

My problem is that I’m not writing an episode of television; I’m writing a novel. So for 40,000 words (100+ pages), the emotional stuff hasn’t come into play yet. It will happen in the second half of the book, but will the audience lose interest before that?

I can already foresee a ton of editing and revision once I’m finished with the rough draft. Which is actually exciting. I’m a weird person in that I LIKE revising. I’ve just got to keep the “inner editor” at bay for a few weeks more while I finish the rough draft.