Well, I was an airhead and forgot to bring my camera home with me to take pictures of books for the Bookshelf Tag, so you'll have to put up with me rambling about my writing. For more on the We Write Books Challenge, click here.
This reformed panster is successfully working her way through the Snowflake Method. I hit a bit of a snag when it came to planning my characters, but I think the couple uncomfortable weeks I spent working with them will help me in the end.
I've now hit the nitty-gritty planning of my novel. I just started into the scene-by-scene spreadsheet. I'm simultaneously excited and terrified. In spite of having a three page long plot summary and ten pages detailing my characters, I have this somewhat irrational fear that I'm going to start making my scene list and find that there's something horribly wrong with the plot.
After I finish my scenes list (shown in the handy-dandy Excel spreadsheet in the upper right corner), I just have to write a paragraph describing each scene. I currently have a phrase/sentence written in one of the cells, along with the POV I want to use. Crossfire has multiple POVs, so one of the fun/difficult parts of planning it is deciding which scenes should be told by each character.
I think that planning will help me not only with my character development, but also with deciding who should tell each scene. In the past I've sort of flown by the seat of my pants. That resulted in a lot of scenes needing to be rewritten from another perspective, or having scenes told three different ways by three different characters and then deciding which one was the most appropriate. Part of my reason for trying the Snowflake Method was to save time, stress, and editing by eliminating it in areas such as POV selection.
Unless I do hit some sort of significant delay (such as spontaneous combustion or a broken plot), I should be ready to start my rough draft here in a couple weeks. If I do finish my planning by the end of March, I'll probably participate in Camp NaNoWriMo.
However, I don't want to sacrifice good planning just to be able to participate. If I do participate, I'll most likely set a lower word count goal than a traditional NaNo so that I can spend the last couple weeks of April preparing for final exams.
Anyone doing Camp NaNo? And is it weird that I have a love for Excel Spreadsheets?
Are you completely rewriting it? Or are you getting your plan in place and editing using your plan?
ReplyDeleteI found I couldn't do the spreadsheet thing. It was just getting too much and I still wanted to be excited about my story when I start writing it. Plus I only have one POV this time around (WHICH IS SO MUCH EASIER THAN THREE, BY THE WAY) so I didn't have to deal with what one character was doing while the other one was doing something else. I think I might hate myself when I'm in the middle of Camp Nano and I don't have a list of scenes to write, but oh well. We'll see what happens.
Good luck on getting all your planning done :)
I am completely rewriting it. I kept a few of the same plot points (read beginning, climax, and end), but trying to work off my old plot just wasn't working very well. The series would have been far too long and not contained a lot of action the way I was setting things up.
DeleteI condensed a few things and examined where I want to be when I'm done with the series. It was also really helpful to examine my characters' motives and try to let the plot grow out of that.
One character POV stories are very nice to write. Fractures is one, actually.
Thanks for the comment!