I didn’t get to write every day this week as I kept a few lunch dates with coworkers. Sometimes the writing that I did get to do went smoothly and sometimes I struggled to imagine the scene I was writing, and at least once I went completely off course. Today’s writing session will be about getting back on course and wrapping up the first chapter. I’m sitting around 4K words at the moment but that will get chopped by about a thousand, I’m guessing. I don’t really want to add another chapter, so clipping and sanding is in order until it fits.
Then it’s onto chapter 2 next week. Bring on the bad guys! It should be fun to get back into the head of Empress Nykostra and see how she is running the war. Having just wrote a complete novel about the child empress that pretty much sets up Counterattack, I’m looking forward to continuing her story. Counterattack will mark my third novel written in Plume Creator. Unless someone comments that they have done more, I’m pretty sure this is a new record for that piece of Open Source writing software. Which is cool. If you get lost in all the options of Scrivener or are outgrowing Word, do give Plume a try. It’s free and it works great on all three operating systems. Oh, and it looks flipping awesome on Ubuntu.
I’m going to try and do a Progress Report every Friday to let you know my status. Not sure if I can keep that schedule, but it might provide me some added incentive to you know, write more.
Even though I’m writing a first draft and generally not stopping to correct any details, I’m still telling a story and as such there are times when I have to ensure the story is moving forward in a logical manner. I wrote about a thousand words of a scene at the end of the chapter only to realize it was going nowhere and didn’t do much for the story. So I cut it out. Saved it in another location, but removed it from the chapter. Then I forced myself to push the story forward and not worry about what the outline said. I ended the scene in less than half as many words and it’s more interesting to boot. So sometimes back peddling is allowed if the structure of the novel is affected.
There will be a fair amount of writer whining in these updates. It’s not something I do in public very often, so sometimes it looks like I’m floundering. In reality, it’s just part of the process for me. Writing a whole scene and then cutting it is me correcting course in the flow of the story. Happens.
I’m curious about the implication in the post above. Having talked with you on this topic from time to time, it almost seems like you’re having some trouble moving forward. Normally when we discuss writing, the process not the creative aspect, we tend to agree on a basic principle of “write it down now, massage it into shape later.” From the above post, it almost seems like you’re focusing on Chapter 1 until it’s much better than now THEN you’re moving on to Chapter 2.
Is this early re-work on Chapter 1 a way of addressing writer’s block or something? Or just not being able to focus due to such a fractured week, so you attempt to maintain track of the story by tweaking Chapter 1?
Like I said, just curious.