Monday 22nd June 2020

I’ve been doing a bit of work on the novel synopsis today.

I often joke to my friend that I’m going to kill all her favourite characters, but this time I might actually mean it.  The outline involves a series of specific murders and I’m afraid if the villain doesn’t complete at least some of them then they’re not really going to be seen as much of a threat.

So today has been spent looking at the targets and deciding which I can afford to kill off.  This is a bit of challenge as there’s some characters I’m trying to build and this would cut them short.  Would be great for this novel… but it would cripple me if there were any sequels.

I made a vow to myself recently not to hold stuff back.  I sometimes have some cool idea and decide that I should keep it for a sequel novel.  But it’s not like I don’t have new ideas, and I sometimes think I’m crippling a story by not giving it everything.

So… if people gotta die, they gotta die.

On top of this, there’s a new character I created that I had plans to utilize going forward.  Except they are no longer a good guy as of today.

All this is pulling the strands of this outline together.  It feels like shoelaces being tightened.

But the outline is still an ungodly mess.  My notes which typically have plot points for each chapter, instead ask questions of myself.  Why is X doing this?  How has this happened?  And the like.

They’ll be figured out.

I now have a fairly solid start and last 20%.  I’m working both forwards and backwards, asking myself both what happens next as well as what lead up to an event happening?  I’ll meet somewhere in the middle, but at the moment it’s a collection of abandoned scenes.

I obviously want to make sure that each story arc has a proper arc, and then want to stitch them together so one leads to another.  Some of the work I’ve done today has helped link a couple of elements of story together.

Overall I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress today but there’s still a lot of work to do.

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