Writing A Novel - Day 4
Not much to report today, since yesterday I was busy with day job stuff and didn’t get much chance to read the books I’m working through. I still haven’t picked up Bell’s Write Your Novel From The Middle. Hopefully I’ll get to that today, though I still have a lot of day job stuff to catch up on after being ill a couple of weeks ago.
I’m journalling anyway just to make sure I touch this every day. Looking at the spreadsheet I shared last time I can see that I had laid out the structure for a novel I’d started writing. That was thematically similar to the one I’m going to start next week, and I’m thinking of it as a trial run. I already know that I hated the prologue of it, and I think the number of POV characters I was planning were simply too many.
One thing I had forgotten I planned to do with that book until I looked at the spreadsheet was for one character in the group to be a sort of double agent who’s planning to betray the group, or who is at least working against their interests. They are, inventively, labelled as “Betrayer” on the spreadsheet.
One of the things I really liked about Joe Abercrombie’s Red Country is that each section of the novel ends with a POV chapter from Ro, one of the children who has been kidnapped who the others are trying to catch up to. These very brief glimpses into her point of view provide a lot of dramatic tension, because we can see what’s up the road from the characters we’re following during the rest of the narrative.
Looking at the spreadsheet, I remember that I’d planned to borrow this structure and end each section of my novel with the Betrayer’s POV. I think the plan was that we wouldn’t know who they are, just that they’re a member of the main group, and there would be a sort of ticking clock building up to them achieving whatever their goal is that the reader is aware of but the characters aren’t. I still like that idea and think it will be a lot of fun to write, so part of my outlining and planning this week is going to be to decide exactly what this character is trying to achieve and why.
That’s all I really have to say about this today. I’m growing more excited to write this thing even though I still don’t really know what it is, but hopefully come Monday I’ll have a better idea of where it’s all going. I still plan to start writing then, but I have a huge stack of Actual Work deadlines that I need to get ticked off before then, so it may have to be pushed back a few days. That will be frustrating, but it is what it is.
Let’s see where things stand tomorrow.