Monday 12 March 2018

Still Not Enough Hours...

My plan (this year) to use my diary better to keep a track of deadlines, as well as meetings/appointments, has shown me I'm very busy two weeks of every month, and have one week clear and another partially filled.

March is probably the exception as I'm doing my reading role for the writers' club's national competition which takes up some of those free days...

Despite all that I've resumed draft 2 of the work in progress.

Making progress
at last...
As I revealed on Facebook- apologies writer friends who already know this- I'm trying a slightly different method for the rewriting and additions in this draft.

When I started writing my first (abandoned) novel I kept my chapters separate, so each chapter was in its own document. I was using a Brother Word Processor with floppy disks then- that's how long ago it was!

Then a few years ago someone suggested it was better to keep novel chapters all in one document.

Actually I did find that really helpful for the first draft. I made progress through my chapter outlines better, so repeated the process with another longer story that was blocking (the next one in the queue).

When I started the 2nd draft (yet again) I wasn't totally happy. There seemed to be so much that I needed to correct: a major plot point; missing scenes, and secondary characters that had arrived later in the 1st draft but also needed to appear earlier, while some of these extras had missing motives too. It was overwhelming me.

So rather than give up I decided to try each chapter as a separate document, allowing me to concentrate on what I needed to do in each one as I work through.

It surprised me how everything suddenly seemed manageable just by focusing on a smaller piece of the whole- which was the total opposite to writing my 1st draft.

Late last year I was seriously thinking maybe I was only okay at producing the ideas and writing the first draft, but the past weeks I've learnt my characters will not allow me to abandon them or their story.

Confidence is just about restored...

3 comments:

Helen Baggott said...

I do think that breaking down 'the book' so you tackle the chapers is an excellent way to tackle drafts – otherwise it can be overwhelming.

Rosemary Gemmell said...

It's very interesting how writers tackle longer works, Carol, and I suspect there are many variations on what's best! I still prefer to keep all my chapters in the one file as I think I'd get confused trying to get them together again. Hope you get that novel finished!

Carolb said...

Helen- for myself I feel it's going to be the best way to work on this current draft, but no doubt I'll need to return it all to one document later to ensure continuity and flow.

Rosemary- I suspect we all have variations on how we do longer work. I know it will be a bit of a pain putting it all back into one document later, but that seems to be what I need to do to make progress.

I'm sure that once I do get it finished, I'll be more prepared for next time. :-)