Writing a Book In a New Way

The book I've been working on has been coming out in a new way for me. Normally I go into a book with a rough idea of how long I want it to be and how I want it to be set up. Often this means chapter breaks come naturally or have been thought of already. For example, with TQR, I wanted there to be ten chapters and two of those epilogue and prologue, because it went well with the theme and cadence of the book. With SaS I knew that I wanted each chapter to feature a different character's point of view, with most of them being Will because she was the main character. For LaM I wanted it all to be third person omniscient with each chapter going between the two major storylines until they met up.

But with my current project chapters have yet to enter the equation. I know roughly how long it's going to be (just shy of, or about the length of, City of Bones) because of how much story I want to fit in and how long I think it's going to take. Of course this is a fluid estimate and the book may end up being longer or shorter, depending on how much time it roughly takes. However, as I began writing I just kept creating page breaks between scenes and character pov shifts. It wasn't a conscious decision it just started happening. When I realized what was happening I thought about going back and throwing in chapter breaks but I've decided to stay away from them for now. I don't need them in a rough draft and I've also found some advantages to writing this way:

1) I can write out of order. For instance I wrote a bunch of scenes that follow each other but then got stuck on one so jumped ahead four or five scenes and then went back later.

2) I can move scenes around. I realized that one character was dominating many scenes directly following each other and I wanted to include another character's narration earlier anyway, so I just switched around the scene order. It worked out nicely and didn't change the structure any great deal.

I like writing in this way but it certainly couldn't work for just any story. Like I've said before, this is my heart-story, something that has been with me a long time and something that I know very well because of how long it has been with me. Writing in this order works so well because I don't need an outline for it I can just go with it and trust the story.

Now, back to writing.

Things are looking up!

And I've been working on a new project. I'm keeping which one under wraps for a bit longer, but here's a hint to those who have been reading the blog for a while: it's the story of my heart. Okay, anyway, what I can say is that I'm tackling this story in a different way than I normally do. I'm approaching writing this book like it's my career. Because that's what I want it to be, after all, and why not treat it with the same respect as any other type of job?

I can't work a full day on my writing, I have too much going on, but I can push myself to work on it every day. Instead of saying "sit down from these hours to work on it as much as you can" I say "get this much writing done, no matter how long it takes" and that's been working for me pretty well. My goal is to have a complete complete version of the story (one I'd be happy to query an agent with) by the end of the year, which means writing 2.5k words a day. And, at least for the last two days, I've managed that without getting burned out.

Today, and the rest of the week, is going to be a test because I have to work. None of my shifts are longer than four hours this week so I'm hoping that helps keep my motivation going. It's nice to say "Can't sleep until this is done" but when I've actually had a full day that's a little harder to achieve. My fingers are crossed and my mind is set, so hopefully that is enough.

One thing I'm doing differently with this story, at least in this earliest draft, is that I'm not breaking it into chapters. I have breaks within the story, but I don't determine whether those are chapters or just regular breaks at this stage. I didn't really go into it thinking this was how I was going to do it, but it came naturally this way and there's no reason to cut it into chapters at this point so I'll keep going like this. I think either during the first editing phase, or during the second draft, I'll try to crack down on where I want the chapters to be, but I'm not too concerned.

Otherwise things have been going pretty well. I've had some dark days but I've also really worked on recovering from these in a healthy way and not letting it affect me for too long. Having a writing project helps in more ways than one, especially since it helps fill in extra time I normally have where I could feel lonely or sad.

Talk to you more about this project soon!