I seem to be developing a new method of writing this story (new for me, not new as in nobody’s ever done it before). I have always been one to write drafts more or less straight through, beginning to end.
If I get stuck, I get stuck and try to find a way through. Sometimes it takes a week or even a month before I find an answer to the problem that allows me to start pushing forward again.
And I thought that was how I would approach this book (with all the fear of getting stuck and losing the momentum that killed the webcomic). Imagine my surprise when I found that I was working in a completely different way.
I had started to write a new draft of the story year before last, but stalled out after the first few chapters when I still couldn’t find a good hook to tie the entire story together. The first two drafts had several pieces that I thought worked well, but the story drifted. It was hard to follow and lacked dramatic tension. Still, I figured I would use those first three or four chapters basically verbatim, then write an entirely new story from scratch afterward.
But as I mentioned on fraziersbrain, I started using Freemind and yWriter 5 to work through the plotting. And what I’ve found in the outline process is that I’m actually reusing a lot of what I had before. The story is not going off in radical new directions, though there have been three major changes that I hope will tie everything together.
So I’m working through the old manuscript scene-by-scene, keeping what works and rewriting where necessary to fit the new plot. And where what I’m doing now means changes in planned later scenes, with yWriter I can write up those sections of scenes and have them ready for when I finally reach that part of the book.
On the other hand, the demands of weekly chapter publishing means that I am going back and polishing each scene before it drops onto the blog. So in a typical week, I will be doing the following: pushing forward on the draft manuscript scene-by-scene, updating the outline and notes for later scenes, prepping the draft scene for next week’s blog and doing a final polish pass on this week’s chapter. I’m writing in pieces, jumping backward and forward through the manuscript in a fashion completely unlike anything I’ve ever done before.
Wish me luck.
