Going Off Script

Journal 12 23-29 August

I’m going off script.

Every week I do these posts, and I will admit that I follow a pattern on them. I have an index card on my desk that has a bunch of headlines and a basic pattern to the post and I try to hit those headlines.

It makes all of these posts the same.

How much I wrote, where I’m at, what I’m doing, etc.

And while all of that is important, and the main purpose of this series of posts. I’m sure it must be getting boring for some of you who come in here every week.

Now in the past I talked about Imposter Syndrome, I talked about throwing out the entire first half of my novel and starting over, and I’ve admitted to just losing all of my steam and not writing for a whole week.

This week, I have a little of all three happening, and I want to go off pattern/ script.

Crazy Week

I like to plan things. I mean I don’t plan out the hour by hour of my day, but I do have goals for every day. The week is planned, and each day has goals, and I know where I want to get over the next few months and by next year.

As the plans get further out, they have less detail.

This week was full of obstacles. And everything had to get overhauled. And last week kicked me in the balls twice (and while a euphemism the week did indeed suck).

My co-worker ended up having to call out of work this week, so on my day off I got called into work and everything fell apart from there. No writing, painting, or other work got done as I ran through the rest of my week in the comic shop.

(Though I did get in 2000 words at the beginning of the week.)

When I have to be away from the keys, I end up thinking about my story, outlining, and doing work in my head. I come up with dialogue and scenes. Changes to character arcs. All of that happens when I’m forced away from the keys (or when I feel I can’t sit at the keys).

This is a good way to feel like I’m still writing even when I’m not at the computer. Because I’m still working. Not making progress but doing the work that will make the writing easier and quicker when I finally do get back to the keys.

The Real Problem

Here’s where I go off pattern and just start talking, and hope that you find this interesting.

Like many writers I usually write in a vacuum. Meaning that I write my novel with no feedback. I know other writers have stronger support networks and writing groups and other such. But I do not really. With this novel I did finally set up to trade chapters every week with a fellow writer and we’ve been giving feedback to each other.

This has been great for so many reasons. First off, it makes me want to write every week to keep producing chapters for them to read. Secondly, it gives me ideas for revision now while I’m working through a novel that is aiming for 200,000 words. Getting the feedback now, chapter by chapter, is far easier than finding someone willing to read the whole manuscript at the end.

But… it has its problems. First, I’m a faster writer than my partner, and I feel like I’m sending him a ton of work, and yet not reciprocating. (In my feeble defense I have read everything he has sent me, he just isn’t sending me anything new).

The Big Problem

There are three big problems.

First, my partner is not really into epic fantasy, and I haven’t set them up properly for the book and the style and the format. The rotating through POVs and telling multiple stories at the same time and having them linked, but not interacting for the first half of the book… does make the beginning slow.

Second, this book takes place after a previous novel, and there are a ton of characters and things going on. The story is over the top, because I’m being very overly ambitious.

When you put both of these together it creates the monster of a problem. Second guessing my format and my story…. And then wanting to revise and restructure the entire beginning of my book… again.

I mean, I just two weeks ago had a break down where I ended up outlining the whole last half of the book. I felt very strong about how I was doing things. And now, after having my partner read through the first seven chapters….

My mind is getting stuck on taking apart most of the beginning of the book and removing the “villain pov” chapters that I have interspaced through the book.

Questioning Myself

I imagine that every writer second guesses and questions their work. I know how neurotic many of my friends are, they must go through this as well. I’m stressing out second guessing myself right now. On the one hand, some of the issues with the beginning of the book are introducing so many characters, story lines, and locations. My partner did point out a flaw in my plotting and I can at the least fix those problems, but my mind doesn’t want to fix the legitimate problems. No. It wants to nuke everything and start again.

And no, we can’t do that. Successful writers need to finish things. I can’t keep nuking the novel and starting fresh. But I DO need to restructure the beginning of the novel and think about whether I want to keep “the pattern.”

And this is where I think I screwed up.

Clever isn’t always Smart

I use Scrivener. And it has a corkboard feature that allows me to outline the novel in a visual manner and also do a frequency chart. And me, thinking I’m SO SMART, decided to pattern my novel.

I’m brilliant.

Look at me, with my 2 hero, 1 villain, 2 hero, etc. pattern. And on top of that, I will rotate which two heroes in each of my storylines, and rotate the villains. Ha ha. So Smart.

Then, I’ll change it up and in the last half of the book I will drop the two villain POVs and replace them with a different one! So smart to just keep throwing in villains.

Sigh.

Now in my defense I have justification for everything I’m doing. But I let the gimmick of the pattern of chapters get to me. I made it force some of the story-telling. When I nuked the original version of the manuscript, I dropped a whole villain pov and the book was better for it, and here I am with still three of them. Also, the villain povs were supposed to be single- or two-page interludes, and they have been getting longer and longer each time I use them. Padding out the book.

Solutions?

So, I can keep going on and on about my concerns and thoughts. I mean, I only just scratched the surface.

For now, I am going to keep pushing forward and trying to give my pre-reader all of the information they need so they understand the reasoning behind the chapter and why I’m doing it the way I did. I’m also going to work on redoing the entire cork board again, with a better beginning and “faster to the story”… the gimmick of every third chapter being a villain is going to be tossed out at some point.

I also might bring in a stronger sense of narrator… as the conceit is that the book is being told as a story to people, and yet my writing style is strongly in the heads of a singular POV character in each chapter. Perhaps I will make the villain chapters told as short interludes completely in the narrator’s voice. Space them out and use them to break the book into sections.

It’s starting to become something… and I feel that in a week or two I might start talking about manuscript 3.0

Outro

Thank you for reading this far. I know I just wandered through my head and I ended up cutting whole paragraphs out of this one as I felt it was getting too long. We all struggle with our work, and I hope that this helps some or all of you. Thank you again.