Friday 30 December 2011

Slow progress, but actual planning.

Book 2 has started to come together. In a very small way, you understand, but my main character now has a name, there is a bit of a history of a village falling into place, and I understand the motivation of my main characters. Unfortunately, as usual, my 'bad guy' is working his charm on me and my narrator has a sly, nasty side. He might surprise me yet and prove to be the villain.
My tally so far of work: 805 words on Tuesday,406 on Wednesday,Thursday 706 words, but several hours of planning, card writing, family tree writing and charts as well. I don't know if I can bash it into shape enough by the end of March for Good Housekeeping, but I'll give it a go.
Normally, I come up with a name and the tiniest bit of plot, and I start writing. That leads to new ideas and they get written, too. The problem is, if the first ideas are rubbish, the whole thing has to be totally rewritten many many times. I'm trying to approach it from a different direction this time, by developing the story until I just have to write. So the snippets I have managed are scenes, or bits of scenes that might be useful and help me get into my characters. This way (hopefully) my characters will be consistently written and not evolve, change age, ethnicity and possibly gender, as they have before.

2 comments:

  1. "...not evolve, change age..." Ah! But surely your characters learn about themselves during the timeline of your story, and therefore evolve, and grow slightly older...OK, OK, you don't mean that...

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  2. Thanks Tony - no, I didn't quite mean that! I am just trying for a bit of consistency...

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