Saturday 15^th August 2020

I managed to get loads done yesterday, and I’m not entirely sure how.

For the most part, yesterday was quite a leisurely day, procrastinating by playing Witcher 3 on the Xbox. From time to time, I got up and dived into a piece of work, but at most it felt like dabbling rather than – as they call it – deep work.

And you know what?

I have a rough structure in Scrivener for the novel I’ve been looking at. I also have a bunch of newsletter ideas – even going so far as to create a template so that if I should come up with any more, I can enter them from my phone.

This feels like an awful lot of work. It certainly didn’t feel like it.

I think the answer is two part. The first is that I’ve been thinking about both these things for a number of days now such that when I came to do them, my subconscious had a very clear idea of what needed to be done. The second is the fact that because I picked at the task over the entire day rather than sitting down and doing it in a single session, the work felt like a lot less.

There’s still work to be done though. I have to be careful with the novel project not to get too involved. The scope of this is simply to get it organised in Scrivener ready to rewrite it, not actually embark on the outline. It’s to give the manuscript a rough chapter structure based on how it is today. I can then – at a later date – start looking at those chapters and asking how they could be enhanced or changed to improve the story.

What’s missing currently are the clues. At points in the story, the characters find out information that drive them towards their next course of action. As it reads right now, the chapters are simply a catalogue of events. I need to understand what gets revealed when so I can help understand character arcs as well as the pieces that need to be in place before a scene can happen. This is the virtual equivalent of those detective shows where there’s a large board with a map and loads of mug shots with bits of string connecting people to places.

But that, whilst tricky, is not the big bit of work, which has now been done. I can already see the structure of the first draft, even if I can’t see all the motivations.

There’s the temptation to jump a little deeper, to actually start working on a new outline, and whilst that’s tempting, I need to refrain for now. I want this novel to be a little project that I pick away at, such that it can turn up, almost out the blue, as a completed project.

And whilst my brain craves a big project (and I’m pretty sure what it will be) I have to wait until around October before starting it. It could be sooner, but still… that might be enough time to do another outline?