Yesterday, I set aside my NaNoWriMo story, Saving Grace, for two weeks so I could begin the editing process with a fresh eye.
I also sorted through current ideas for NaNoWriMo 2010 with the hope one of them would strike my fancy enough to occupy my attention all or most of those two weeks. There are currently four ideas in that folder and most of them were kind of ‘blah’ feeling yesterday.
One did catch my attention.
I read the day before (Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell) that writers should review the first act of the novel before writing the rest. The reason is that the first act carries the story and if it’s not strong enough with the first draft, it needs to be fixed before the rest of the story is written.
When my attention was grabbed by this new idea, I intended to work out the snowflake to the end of the first act, just to get a feel for it. It was late in the afternoon by then and I thought that would give me enough to do for the rest of the day and would help me keep my 3,000 word-a-day writing goal.
It did help keep the goal, but I never even got to the first act. I opened up the character interviews and spent the rest of my day defining the main character, his background and challenges and as much other background information as I could compile.
Then, I started in on the chief source of friction, a ‘black sheep’ brother. I barely got to the opposition character, and still managed to write over 3,000 words for the day. I love it when that happens!
I continued that work today and have had another day of excellent progress. Nearly 5,000 words as I write this post. Thank You, LORD!
I can already see that doing the snowflake first is the way to go because some scene ideas I thought were a natural for this story no longer fit the main character. That will save time down the road because I won’t need to write those scenes only to discard them later.
