New directions

This past week, I’ve been going through Bringing Stella Home at quite a good clip.  I’m going through the rough draft as I had it at the end of April, making some major revisions that hopefully are going to make it easier to write the middle section.  

I’ve been going along at a good clip, getting through as many as seven thousand words a day (it helps that I’m not taking classes or working right now), but today I hit something of a wall and realized I couldn’t go forward if I didn’t have some serious  backstory worked out.  So, instead of writing much in the book itself, I went through each of the characters in this mercenary unit and wrote out ALL of their backstories.

It was fun, and took a lot more time than I was expecting.  It also surprised me how much it fleshed them out, made them all real people.  I could go through and write a prequel to this novel now, where the viewpoint alternates between all of these characters and tells how they got together and formed the unit that they are now.  I won’t do that, since it would take too much time, but now I can do it, and that’s going to help out a ton in figuring out what has to happen next.

For this project, one of my goals is to experiment with the three act structure and see if I can strengthen my writing by strictly following that story format.  Well…when I say strictly, I don’t mean that I’ll make the characters do stupid things just to move the plot where it needs to go.  At least, I’m going to try not to end up doing that–we’ll see how it ends up.  The first draft is probably going to be horrendous.

Speaking of horrendous, I’ve been surprisingly discouraged with this story in the past few days.  I mean, it’s probably just me, but it seems that this novel is really just a piece of crap.  Of course, it’s a rough draft, so it’s supposed to be crap, but it’s just frustrating.  Then again, my writing group in English 318 seemed to be really into this story–sometimes, it seemed that they struggled to find things to critique about it–but I wonder if a lot of the positive stuff they said wasn’t just because they were being nice.

Meh.  It doesn’t matter.  Of course this draft is going to need a lot of work–it’s a rough draft, for crying out loud.  If I didn’t think it needed some serious work, something would be wrong with me.

The cool thing is that part I ends at about the 30k mark–right smack at 25%, assuming this novel ends up being about 120k.  That’s exactly where it should be, according to the three act structure.  Encouraging!

I mapped things out on my calendar, and I’ve figured that if I do 3,00 words a day, I can finish this draft by the 15th of June.  3,000 words a day shouldn’t be too hard to manage–I’ve got another 40k of stuff from the previous unfinished draft, and while much of that needs some deep revisions, I can probably recycle at least two thirds of it without making too many changes.  I’ve got a couple of conventions coming up here–CONduit and BYU Writers for Young Readers–but I think I can still make things average out quite nicely.

15th of June.  It’s a good target.  It also gives me practically the entire summer to revise and re-revise my other novels, perhaps even start a completely new project.  Huzzah!

(image courtesy photo researchers)