Since I’m done growing a baby, I thought I’d move on to growing a novel, cultivated specifically for the little munchkin. (Who knows, maybe it will fund his college? Pipe dream?) I also thought it might be neat if I shared the process in my blog. That way, if I actually produce a novel, I (and others) can go back later to review and hone the process.
I should mention, in the spirit of NaNoWriMo which I had to skip out on because of said munchkin, this is also an experiment in how quickly I can bust out a novel. Because of that, I’ve decided to set my novel in the present, on planet earth, in this dimension. In other words, it’s not going to be scifi.
The Process Begins
There’s no right way to start a novel, so here’s what I did. I took out a blank sheet of paper, turned it on the horizontal and drew a line. Next, I placed vertical hash marks at three even intervals along the line to divide it into four equal segments. The beginning and ending of the line represent the beginning and ending of my novel. The hash marks represent crisis/turning points. The horizontal line represents the timespan, which in my case is seven days.
With my rudimentary drawing complete, I wrote a sentence describing each crisis/turning point, and then began penciling in high level plot details leading up to each. When my ideas became too big to fit on one sheet of paper, I pulled out an empty notebook.
Since my story takes place within the span of seven days, I wrote each day at the top of a blank page (“Sunday”, “Monday”, “Tuesday”, et cetera). Now I had seven beat sheets on which to begin organizing my plot elements. Not surprisingly, I started out strong and fizzled out quickly. Why? My story idea didn’t include enough conflict and I had no idea who my characters were or where they lived. Time to shift gears again.
More later.
Everybody seems to be challenging writers to plan, plot and write. I like that. I have a website that should come up in March and will feature several finished novels and hopefully by then I can be close to finishing the sequel (in a trilogy) to one of them. I don’t do the planning and plotting (my method is the cinematic novel that unfolds a scene at a time, but your method has a lot positives to it.
Enjoy your site and postings, the music…almost everything you do. You’re only one of three sites like this that I’ve bookmarked. Keep up the good work.
Congratulations on the little one…a real cutie.
I look forward to seeing your site!
I only have one finished novel under my belt so I don’t have a tried and true method yet. I just know for myself, the flow of my writing tends to stagnate/stop when I come to a point in the story that requires some backstory, or when I come to descriptions of physical places. So, I thought, why not dream up some of that stuff ahead of time, let it simmer in my brain a bit so the characters and the place becomes more real. Then as I am writing, I can more easily take the cinematic approach you mentioned. We’ll see how it goes!