Perhaps it seems odd that I just announced the publication of my last novel, My Hope Secured, a week ago, and now I’m writing about beginning another novel. But the only way I know to improve as a writer is to keep writing.
It’s a very different feeling facing a blank screen than the final nitty-gritty editing process of searching for repetitive words and extra spaces. My current blank screen is causing me even greater angst than when I began my last two books because I’m switching genres for this next book. Or rather, going back to the genre of my very first novel that I wrote under a pseudonym.
Because I will probably publish my next book under the same pseudonym, I won’t say anything about the content on this blog. It is a contemporary novel—what I call a corporate thriller. The voice and language and the situations my characters face are very different than those in the historical fiction I wrote about settling the American West.
I do plan to go back to my Oregon Chronicles series, but I need to do more research before I write the next book in that series, and so while I research, I will write a contemporary novel.
Rather than content, in this post I want to describe the process I’m using to begin the novel.
I do have a leg up, in that this book is a sequel, so I know the characters. But I haven’t worked with them in several years—I don’t even remember some of their names. And when I wrote the first draft of the first book, I knew nothing about story structure, so I once I wrote that first draft, I had to wrestle it into a novel.
This time, I want to short-circuit the process, and I hope save myself significant time. I thought about doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) on this book, which would require writing a 50,000-word draft in thirty days. But I realized, if I just wrote, without planning the book, I’d end up exactly where I was on my first book several years ago—I’d have very rough text I would have to wrestle into a novel.
So instead, I have been re-reading materials on how to plot a novel, hoping to do a decent job of planning before I write. My best resources are K.M. Weiland’s site, Helping Writers Become Authors, and Alexandra Sokoloff’s materials on story structure.
I started by writing a logline (a two to three sentence summary of what the book is about—essentially, the elevator pitch). I’m answering questions about protagonists and antagonists to get to character sketches of a sort. After spending a few days on these tasks, I’m beginning to get an overall sense of the story.
I’m also listing scenes in the main plot and in various subplots, but the “big picture” work I’m doing is helping me to see what’s relevant and what isn’t. And how the characters have to change from the beginning to the end of the book.
One character is becoming more important than I thought. Another less so. I think I’ll leave out one subplot altogether, at least for the first draft.
Along the way, I also decided that I would start working with the Scrivener for Windows beta version. I had thought I would start My Hope Secured in the Scrivener beta in early 2018, but the beta wasn’t far along enough for me to trust it then. Now, I’m told, it is near final.
So I am using a new program to plot and write this new project. So far, I’ve been able to find the tools I need in the Scrivener for Windows beta, but I’m nowhere near as proficient in it as in the old Scrivener version.
Still, it’s an opportunity to learn the new Scrivener from the ground up . . . just another blank page I’m facing. I’m using Anne Rainbow’s 14-lesson course on Scrivener 3 for Mac (see ScrivenerVirgin.com), which is helpful, though there are differences between the officially launched Scrivener 3 for Mac and the Windows beta version.
Not only am I using the Scrivener for Windows beta, I am also syncing it with Aeon Timeline, which is another program for writers, a program that helps with developing logical sequences for scenes and setting them in chronological order. I’ve had the program for a couple of years, but haven’t really made use of it. This time, I’m forcing myself to use it, because of how I want to structure this next book.
Such is the messy work of writing a novel. But it’s fun. Far more fun than any other career path I’ve tried.
Writers, how do you begin your stories?
