I’m getting close to the end of this step of the editing process which has my mind on a critical upcoming step: weaving storylines together. This is a critical aspect of story flow and, of course, I have a process. We’ll talk about it below. Also, sorry for the missed blog last week. I’m still getting my footing with my new job so figuring out when to write and post this is a learning process.
Drawing from the Well
The last couple of weeks have seen decent progress on this edit getting 14,000 words closer to finishing it. I swear future rounds will be faster since they’re so targeted (at least until I get back to full passes at the end). I’m on the last full arc before I get into the Interstitial scenes. I still have at least ten new chapters to write to fill things out, but that’s okay. This book is coming together and the work I’m doing on it is making it feel great. I can’t wait for you all to read it.
Page 258/300
129,429/149,603 Words
Filling the Well
I was WAY behind a couple of weeks ago and, for a bit, it only got worse. I’m finally starting to catch up. I’ve gone from 8 books behind to only 4 books behind. I’ve found a series of novellas (Penric and Desdemona) that are helping me chew my way back to full status. And they’re good! Since the last blog, I finished Blade Breaker. I feel like it was a great book, my ears just bounced off it. It’s not fair, but thicker British accents in narrators make it harder for me to focus. I also listened to Common Sense by Thomas Paine, Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey, and the first two Penric books. It’s been an okay week. This was very much a quantity-over-quality week, and you have those sometimes. Every book can’t be a blockbuster. Full List
85/105 for #ProjectBookworm2023
It was an exciting weekend for Blizzard fans as the first in-person BlizzCon in four years took place. As a WoW player, it was especially exciting for me as the next three expansions for the game were announced. It’s early days but it looks GOOD. Super stoked for the next handful of years in WoW.
Well Chat
Story weaving is as much of an art as drafting is. On the first two books, I wove the storylines together in the planning phase to make sure everything was balanced. With Book III, this was too much of a lift. There was too much going on in too many disparate locations, so I took a different approach. I figured out the key five storylines and wrote each one individually. Some of the chapters naturally intertwined at the beginning of the book before they spiraled out, but after that, everything was segregated.
This was great on the one hand because I was able to focus in on each storyline exclusively as I wrote it. For Arc 1, I only wrote Arc 1 until it was finished. Then I moved to Arc 2 and did the same. This continued until the first draft was done. The downside was that the first draft was then effectively five and a half short stories. I needed a way to bring them back together as a single book.
That’s where my new approach comes in. The chapters themselves are pretty set now that I’m making it through this draft. The holes in each story are clear, so I’m plugging those, and the places where things need to be shifted or chopped and changed are being addressed. Once I finish this walkthrough of the book, the chapters will be mostly set. That allows me to manipulate their location without sacrificing malleability later.
Methodology is important, of course. To do this, I needed something tactile. Parts of the process just require that for me and this is one of them. The solution was note cards.
I know it’s low tech. I know we all used them in middle school for flash cards or research papers. It doesn’t matter. These are individual units that I can manipulate quickly by hand. Each one has an indicator for the arc it represents, the chapter number for that arc (because the arc chapters are properly ordered, so we can’t lose that), the POV character, the story eighth it falls into as well as the story beat it represents, and the title. That’s all. With all those note cards in hand, I’ll be able to group them by story beat and then shuffle them together in an order that feels most impactful to the story. Once it’s done with the notecards, I’ll number them, bind them, and then use them as reference to do the same exercise with the actual text.
It might sound like one step forward and two steps back, but this is what makes sense in my head. How do you organize your written documents (notice I didn’t limit that to books)? What’s your process? Maybe I could learn something from you. Let me know in the comments below or on social media.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG