Friday, June 30, 2017

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.

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