Writing A Novel - Day 6
Yesterday I planned to start the notecarding part of my outlining process. That didn’t happen, but I’m not overly concerned about it. Instead I did something that either James Bell or Jim Driver recommends - I can’t remember which of the many ‘how to outline a novel’ books I’ve read I saw this in, though I think it was the Driver book - which is something he calls the “white hot document”.
I dictated this one rather than typing, and actually found it very helpful. I spent an hour sitting and talking about my novel aloud to myself, figuring out the mirror moments and character arcs for the protagonist, the antagonist, and another one of the POV characters. I think I also decided that I’m only going to have three POV characters, down from the four or five I was originally aiming for.
In working out their mirror moments I had to also work out their motivations and their transformations, and I think the book now has a really solid emotional core - especially in the juxaposition of the protagonist and the antagonist’s motivations, goals, and transformations. Without getting too deep into it, I realised that the core of this novel is a bunch of characters asking themselves “what sort of person am I?” Here they are in brief:
The protagonist, scarred from the deaths of his family, tells himself that he’s the sort of person who runs into the burning building to save people without worrying about getting hurt himself. He tries desperately to be this person throughout the novel, but when the stakes are at their highest he realises the truth: he was never that guy. He will always save himself first.
The second POV character has grown jaded. She wants to change, to become someone who leaves a mark on the world and does good. She doesn’t want to be a cog in the machine, extracting wealth for a corporation and doing nothing of impact. But when she tries to change, she ends up with less than she started with.
The antagonist is thirsty for power and knowledge, and he reaches a point where he asks himself how ruthless he actually is. Is he the sort of person who will do whatever it takes to achieve his goals? His answer is a resounding yes, but he reaches too far, for too much, and it ultimately destroys him.
Without the details of how all this works it’s obviously hard to understand how the protagonist and antagonist’s journeys mirror each other, but I think they do, and I think this novel of horrible dungeons and grimdark fantasy is going to have a very solid emotional core. I’m really happy about that.
The other thing I figured out was an answer to the question of “what are these dungeons, actually?” That question has been lurking in the back of my head ever since I conceived of this novel idea and I know that in the past it’s the sort of thing that would have tripped me up in the draft. Nailing down an answer to it before I start writing has me feeling much more confident about getting through this novel, because I’m not going to be trying to find an answer while I’m drafting.
So today’s job, finally, is going to be notecarding. And I feel very prepared for it. I do still have deadlines for the day job so the actual writing may not be able to start tomorrow as planned, but I’m okay with that. If I can notecard today then I can write one paragraph summaries of each chapter/scene tomorrow, and while that’s not “real” writing it’s still part of the process, and it’s still the first concrete step of getting words on the page before what I personally consider to be proper writing happens.
An aside, now. I’ve blogged in the past about wanting to build (or buy) a distraction-free writerdeck. One of my priorities with it has always been portability, but the more I think about it the more I realise that I don’t actually work out of the house all that often, and my Chromebook realistically fills that niche for me. But I’d still like a distraction-free solution for writing at home.
I think I may have found one. I’ve bought an old Panasonic KX-W1000 word processor from ebay, and a USB floppy disk drive so that I can actually get the words off it (which is, you know, quite important). I’ll have to find somewhere in my office or on my desk for it to live, because it’s not going to be small, but I really like the idea of sitting down and writing at this completely offline device for an hour at the start of every day. And because it can also be used as an electric typewriter it means I can print my manuscript from it when it’s finished (though I’ll need to buy a ribbon/cartridge/whatever it takes). “Print the manuscript from the typewriter I wrote it on” is a small goal, but it’s a goal that I like, and it’s one that I can look forward to.
That’s all I have to say in this journal today, because it’s 9am and I haven’t actually done any work today. But I feel good about where this is sitting, and I feel good about my new daily writing/journalling habit.