13,837 words in a day?

Yeah, that’s right.  Believe it or not, I barreled through about 13,837 words today.  That’s thirteen THOUSAND, not thirteen hundred.

Now, only about a thousand of that was new stuff  that I was writing.  Most of the rest of it was rearranging scenes that I’d already written, touching them up only a tiny bit.  I did merge a couple of scenes, delete or tone down some stuff, etc.

So really, about 90% of my work today was just revision, and not even really hardcore revision at that.  I’m still treating this version of my story as a rough draft; I’m not taking the time to polish things up and fix the known minor problems.  Really, I’m just running through what I’ve already written to make sure I have what I need to get past the roadblock I hit back in April.

The biggest thing I’m doing right now is rearranging scenes into entirely new chapter arrangements.  This seems to be a problem everytime I write a story with multiple viewpoints: I never seem to get the prelude-rising-falling-resolution-cliffhanger action that good chapters have.  I write scenes as they come to me, in a progression that seems natural at the time, but once I take a step back, I find that things work better on the macro-level if I complete rearrange which scenes come where in the narrative.

Part of that is that sometimes I just need to write a few paragraphs (or even a few scenes) just for me to figure out what’s going on, plotwise or settingwise.  What I’m finding with Bringing Stella Home is that I’m taking scenes from James and Danica’s viewpoints and moving them up a chapter or two, cutting out the filler in the middle.

I’ve got a long way to go before I master the art of good chapter structure.  Or perhaps it’s something that I do better when I’m revising, not drafting.  After all, I think I’m more of a discovery writer than a firm outliner.  Perhaps I write in a sort of puzzled up everywhere kind of way, and then do best when I don’t put all the pieces together until after I’ve vomited them all on the page.

I am getting more excited about this story, though.  Taking a step back and looking at things from a more global perspective has really re-energized me.  I can see the major turning points, and that helps me to build up for them much better.

I’m only worried that the “midpoint” is going to be somewhere around the 3/5ths mark, not the halfway mark as it should be.  One of my goals with this book is to see if I can hold to the three act structure and whether that makes my story any stronger.  But, according to the website, the midpoint occurs “approximately” at the halfway point, so I guess I can fudge it.

Also, the midpoint is supposed to be where the main character hits rock bottom.  Hee hee hee…oh, he will.  He will.  Bwahahahaha!!!

In the meantime, you owe it to yourself to listen to this: