Worldbuilding

This is what I was doing the other day.  The FLSR (Foreign Language Student Residence) at BYU has chalkboards in the common rooms, and I just discovered that those can be WAY useful for diagramming your story.

On this occasion, I drew out a couple of space battles, according to how they’d play out with the FTL technology I’ve been thinking up and a few other things.  I worked things out logically and figured out a few basic rules of combat–some basic strategies that you can expect people to follow.  I then took what I know about the Hameji, the main antagonists in my novel, and figured out how they would use their special abilities to counter these tactics.

Pretty fun.  Now, when I go back and rewrite the beginning, I can make the opening space battles feel a lot more vivid, immediate, and engaging.

I finished part 1 of my story last week, and now I’m at the beginning of part 2.  I’ve got the novel roughly outlined out in my head, and it’s following fairly closely to the three act structure.  Not exactly, but pretty close.

According to Brandon Sanderson (and several other people), act 2 is the most difficult part of the story.  It’s where  you need to do the “blue collar work” of simply sludging through and writing the thing.  It’s where things get complicated enough that you can get lost if you don’t know how to plot things out.  Considering the fact that I’ve only gotten this far with two other novels I’ve written, I’m expecting this part to be really difficult.

Only 599 words today, and none on Sunday (more because I was feeling sick than anything else).  It really is getting easier to get hung up on a single scene; even if I know where I want to be three or four chapters from now, if the scene right in front of me isn’t working out, it’s almost impossible to move past it and get things to work.

Today I took a big piece of butcher paper from upstairs and drew a diagram of everything I’ve written so far, scene by scene.  That was immensely helpful.  Now I know what this chapter is about, what I need to do to bring it to a natural close and leave a hook for the next few chapters, and how to develop my characters and what they’re doing.

While taking a shower, I figured out what Estella needs to do next, and how to take her story over to the end of act 2 and carry her to act 3.  That’s something of a breakthrough.  I’m excited.

And…it’s late.  I’d better get some sleep.