Tried something new

Huzzah! I finished up chapter 14 last night. But I did try something new. I’m not sure how many of you know that I write everything by hand first. The feel of the pen to paper really helps me be connected to the story at hand, rather than worrying about the beauty of the prose.

However, lately I’ve been having a hard time getting everything down. It has been a struggle to just sit down and write. My writing group helped immensely because I had a deadline and not much choice. But now that I don’t have another deadline for a while, I can feel myself starting to slip again.

Last night I was doing some beta reading for Matthew Quinn and got to a stopping point. I looked at my notebook and had an idea. What if, instead of trying to write in prose, I just wrote very basic. Giving myself the details, without worrying even about POV or sentence structure.

So I went for it. And it basically looks like this: Billy goes up to the store and walks around, not knowing what to buy. He doesn’t know that he’s being followed. Going down the bread aisle he catches his pursuer in the reflection of a mirror overhead. He turns around and says, “Hey man, I see you there!”

It reads like crap. But man it does exactly what I need it to do. I get my details down, get my feel for the flow, while leaving myself room for nuance once I get into Scrivener to “commit” it to the book.

Which it is funny. This method goes back to “The Frame” method I had talked about in another post long ago. I had thought I’d discarded it in favor for some other methods, but now it looks like I’m going back to it. To a degree.

This first novel has been a huge learning experience but I love it. I can honestly say I’m finding my own path now. Finding what works for me to produce quality work in a relatively short amount of time. Which is good. Because as I draw closer to the end of the book, the more pumped I get to see it in my beta readers hands.

I bet you are just as excited, right? Write.