Week Three: Planning

One of these days I'll get better at planning when I'm going to write these blog posts.  Until then, I'll be concentrating all my planning energy on the novel.

I am planner.  I can schedule and plan things to death, but I tend to get caught up in the planning too much to actually execute the results.  So, when I decided to write this summer, I vowed to do as little planning as possible and only write until I couldn't go anymore.  As I've previously said, I've been planning this in my head for years, so despite my lack of planning in writing, I've known what I've wanted to write.  However, for the past two weeks, I have been working with three characters all in different places in the world, doing different things.  This week, I hit the time in the novel when their paths first cross.  Now, instead of planning about what will happen five chapters from now, I'm having to work out the logistics of perspective and the characters' individual storylines intersecting.

This is what led to my "first manuscript draft," which I wrote about in the mid-week update.  I combined all the scenes I've written over the past weeks in chronological order into one document.  This has led me to develop an entirely new structure for the novel that I hadn't been planning on, and with a structure, I now have a much better idea of when and where certain characters need to be interacting and in whose perspective all the scenes should be, even though I don't have a list of all the scenes I'll be writing - just the absolutely necessary ones.

Since this is following a post with all my stats, etc, I don't have much to write this time around.  The plan for the following week is to stay with one particular character the entire time.  She took a turn for crazyville on Friday when a sub-sub-plot quickly became her main characterization/character motivation.  I have no idea where this is going, which is exciting and, I guess, means I'm doing a good job at only planning what I absolutely have to.

Quote of the Week: Starting Point

As I've blogged before, this undertaking might be the most insane thing I've ever committed to.  And now that I've begun a bit of planning, it seems both slightly more and slightly less of an ordeal.  In this, a hunter, D'rina, has left her comfort zone to research a peculiar incident she witnessed while hunting.  She is now utterly surrounded by research materials.

"D’rina had no idea where to start. The undertaking suddenly overwhelmed and crashed down on her. She should have kept to hunting what could be stalked. 


She grabbed the scroll from the top of the closest stack to her.  [...]


As she unrolled the scroll and began to read, D’rina hoped the librarian didn’t mind that she might be there for forever."