Crafting Process And Plots – The Climb #975

Sunday 24th October 2021

I’m feeling pretty good with myself today. I started late today and thought I wouldn’t get many words done, but I ended up getting over 5.5k done. And this was despite the focus of the day being on outlining the novella.

Surrounding myself with focused, business-minded, and fast writers has really pushed me in the last couple of weeks. I feel my process has massively improved over the last couple of months. I was doing OK during the pandemic, but it often felt like a fight. Now, I feel I’m more focused, better organised.

I was turning out around 45k words a month, which wasn’t bad, even if it was spread thin over several projects. For October, it looks like I’ll have written over 100k and edited over 50k. As recently as August, that would have seriously burnt me out. Now, I seem to take the words in my stride.

Behind this is a realisation. If I write 1000 words on a project that’s good, but if I write 2000 words I get it done in half the time; 3000 words, a third of the time.

However, in order to do that, I need to not be thinking of what to write next. The problem I had with the first draft of The Accursed was that I’d plan out the next couple of scenes, catch up with myself and then need to break while I figured out the detail for the following scenes.

Writing fast these past couple of weeks on test shorts has proved to me that I can write fast and have a good level of quality. BUT, and this is key… shorts don’t need a lot of project management. Yet, I’m still using a structure and have gone as far as to build a template in Scrivener for my own use.

The novella is going to see me take this a step further. And to do that, I need to do a bit of reading. I was looking at a plot with a four act structure (which is a structure I’ve not used before). I spent quite a bit of time today reading a craft book on the structure and what it actually means. I worked on the plot as I read and it’s given me a basic outline for the novella, broken down into scenes. However, I’m in the process of reading further on how I can take this structure and produce a complete roadmap for the story.

I’ll be honest and say at the moment that it feels like overkill and I have enough to start the novella. But what I’m reading says this is a trap. They may be right. I had this level of detail for The Accursed and whilst I never lost the story, I wasn’t always sure about the POV or action that needed to take place in a scene. As a result, The Accursed took a while to write and is going to take a bit of editing.

The aim is to avoid that with The Worthy and try to write something that needs little revision. That means putting the work in at the front end. That means testing it on the novella. That means reading about the craft aspect, and following the technique.

That definitely seems to be a mantra for me at the moment. I’m good at taking technique whether it be writing or business and adapting it, but I think I need to be better at following to the letter. I’m going to try it, anyway.

So the plan is to outline this novella in detail, and then write it quick, remembering all the time that an extra thousand words on a story could halve the time. And if I continue to write like I have this month… it’s not impossible that I have not only this novella, but the first draft of The Worthy by Xmas.

Now I’ve gone and blown it by tempting fate!