Never Say Never

I hereby confess…

Just when you think you have your process down pat, it jumps up and bitchslaps you back to freshman year.

Seriously. I know it sounds like I come on here and am all, blah blah blah, I outline all my books in advance and then I make my little plotting boards and then I write and isn’t my process so polished and clockworkesque.

Yeah, that’s B.S., basically.

So I started a book last year, NaNoWriMo 2005, and it was going along well, lots of lovely words matching my lovely synopsis. I had to stop NaNo though and drop out to do some line and copyedits of SSG, so I picked it up later that winter and even, early this spring, finished up a partial. And then I put it aside and wrote UTR. And when I looked at it again… yeah. Didn’t work. I was 70 pages in and the inciting incident had barely gotten off the ground. Blecch.

So this NaNo, I took a brand new blank document and started again… same story that had been percolating in my head, same loose outline, screw the scene by scene until I can get the story pace to pick up, and realized that I needed a whole new narrative structure. (Actually, I realized that in advance, which led to my whole POV discussion of a few weeks ago.)

So one of the things that a lot of writing instructors advocate and that I always pooh-pooh is character worksheets. Never do ’em, am not really intersted in interviewing my characters to find out what their favorite ice cream flavors are. If ice cream is important to the plot, I pick one. If not, we’ll never know. Seriously, I didn’t know Amy’s eye color until writing UTR. (George’s? Hell yeah. Amy’s? Not so much. And, as it happens, her eye color didn’t end up making it into this book, so you can all wait until and if there is ever an SSG3 to find out what it is. Only two other characters get eye colors in SSG. Points to people who know who they are!)

But I realized that in the restructuring of this book, it would behoove me greatly to do a sort of magazine style comparison worksheet, not unlike the quiz about the SSG characters on my website, where I describe how each character would act in a given situation. But in chart form. So I made one. And it rocks. And no, you can’t see it.

Anyway, I think it helps a lot. This is stuff I knew, because I’ve been thinking of these characters for a long time. But it clarified things a lot in my head to see it laid out like that.

And the moral for this weekend, my friends, is never say never. Who knows… maybe I’ll write a book without knowing the ending next.

Um… maybe not. ::shudder::

PS: Did some good NaNo-ing this Thursday.

NaNoWrimo
5215 / 50000 (10.4%)