Now My Rough Draft is Really Done?

Laura Highcove

I finally completed the last fight of The Storyteller. However, it’s hard to give myself credit for it when I know how much more work there is to do. I know I should give myself credit for finishing, but when I say it’s done, I feel like it really should be done …you know?

At this point, all of the plot is there. According to my own ranking system, now the rough draft of my story is officially done, as all of the prose is there. No more unwritten scenes that need to be added. Well at least not that I’m aware. I’m confidant there is still a lot of work to do. My next step is to go through the story in reverse scene order. My hope is that it will help me greatly with foreshadowing because I’ll know the things I need to foreshadow before I get to the scene where they should be foreshadowed.

Technically this draft is supposed to be ready for beta readers by the end of the month. That’s still my goal. After this next week I should have more of a plan of how much actually needs to be done. I have a feeling my timeline may end up needing to shift. That’s okay, because it’s getting better.

Miniatures to Play Out a Fight Scene

Laura Highcove

So I wanted to do this post last week, and then life got in the way, so here I am getting it done now.

Last week I worked on the final fight in the Cinderella tale, which has a lot of moving parts. I decided the best way to keep track of everything was to pull out a play-mat and some miniatures and play out the positioning and movement of everyone in the fight. I took the pictures with my camera phone, so some of them are blurry, but I labeled them so you can see where everyone is.

You can see the terrain drawn onto the map if you look closely.

Yep, that says ‘large hellbeast’.

Wildrose is kiting.

omg, what is the Prince of Goldfield doing?

Everyone in a pile.

And it ended up helping me more than I thought it would to have it all laid out here. Mostly because it showed who would be able to see what better than me just picturing it in my head.

I also fell behind on my writing because of life happening last weekend, so I’ve been working hard to catch back up. Not sure if I’ll be done by May like I planned. Then I only have a month to smooth everything out for my beta readers in June. I suppose if I have to push it back a few weeks or a month it won’t be the end of the world, but I’m going to try and keep that from happening.

Time for Fights

Laura Highcove

So as I established the week before last, I am horrible at conflict, and so it directly follows that I am horrible at writing conflict, which leads me to be horrible at writing fights scenes (verbal as well as physical). But, at the same time, I write fantasy, a genre in which people are much more likely to be competent in a fighting style, and use said fighting style against an opponent, than in non-fantasy.

I have fifteen fight scenes in this book, though the final fight is three “notecards” because it’s in three parts. Luckily, my husband is *very* good at writing fight scenes. Yesterday I went over the first three fights with him for motivations and rough choreograph and today I cleaned up two of them and wrote one from scratch. However, I am actually pretty happy with how they’re shaping up so far.

So I have twelve more to write, (Then of course I have to clean them up) and three weeks to write them. That means four a week with a whole week to work on the final fight. Considering I usually give myself a week for a whole chapter, that seems like it will be about right.

I do need to work on being more disciplined with my writing though. I do well when I have only a little time, but if I give myself a large block, I really end up distracted. It’s not horrible for now, but if I ever make the jump to writing full time, or even more than I’m doing now, I think I’ll run into trouble.

No Good Title

Laura Highcove

I completed the revision pass on time, though as you can see, I am posting this a bit late, because I didn’t write it till late, because I was pounding away at my revision through Saturday. Sunday was our Wrestlemania party, for which we cook.

So here I am to tell you that it is indeed done, and I am on to step one of writing my fight scenes better, which includes looking over the 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons character sheets that my husband made for all of the main characters. I’ll probably write a more in depth analysis about why I decided to do this and how it’s helped, but for now I’m getting all my ducks in a row and hammering out exactly what remnants and artifacts everyone has so I know what they can do.

Total guess on the timeline: I want to have the character sheets finalized by Friday. Then it will be time to work with my husband on choreography. There are approximately 15 fights, a few of which are mere scuffles and three of which are just different phases of the same fight.

Talk of Superpowers

Laura Highcove

Talk of Superpowers:
There was talk recently in the DIY MFA sphere, about superpowers, that aspect of every writer’s personality that helps them to write their story.

I waffled on this a little bit because I was thinking of it from a place of “What am I good at?”. Instead I realized that what Gabriela actually meant is closer to what my yoga instructor refers to as a dharma. Now if you google dharma, you won’t get this definition, but I use it to mean a person’s true self. If you set aside your family and friends, your job, your hobbies, your passions, and pursuits, then who are you?

I am authentic:
There was one call for DIY MFA where I remember Gabriela asking, “How did you tell the people in your life that you are a writer?”

And I remember thinking on that while other people gave their answers, and then she asked me that question and I said: “I never had to tell people I was a writer, I just always have written, and the people around me know that I write.”

I later realized that that sums up who I am. I am authentic. Everything that I am is open and out there and everything that I’m not doesn’t exist.

How this shows up in my writing:
My characters end up authentic, truthful, reasonable, and willing to see another person’s point of view. It makes it difficult for me to write truly evil villains and only recently have I been able to write characters having verbal arguments without one or both of them apologizing and coming to see the other person’s point of view by the end.

This means I don’t have conflict created by misunderstandings. When my characters fight or disagree, it’s because they have (at least mostly) reasonable views on life, that just happen to conflict.

I want my readers to be able to understand where a character is coming from, even if they don’t agree with where they’re going. (Oh, that sounds tweet-able, too bad I don’t twitter.)

Now for other things:
I wanted to write this post because I wanted to put up something about myself that wasn’t just a laundry list of the things I’ve been doing in my writing. I’m not sure if people are enjoying that or not, since I don’t really get feedback, but I feel like it might get old after a while.

For those of you who might like my laundry list: I’m still working on the Arthur tale. It is rough and I don’t feel like I have a focus right now. The story is just kind of happening, which means I just need to keep powering through until something comes out that feels right. One more week and then I start on fights.

Continuing the Smoothing

Laura Highcove

Nothing much of interest going on this week. I’m still working through the story in the same method as I mentioned last week, though I am a good deal further than I expected to be. Bluebeard was quick and easy, which was not a surprise, but the Headquarters section also went very smoothly except for the scene here that has always given me trouble. When I talk about the writing of this book after it comes out, I will certainly talk about how important this scene is, and how dang-blasted hard it was to write.

I started the King Arthur tale midday on Saturday and I’m already aware of how not smoothly this tale is going to go. But it is the newest part of this story (writing wise) and thus the most raw. Even the climactic final battle and denouement were written prior to this section. However, I can start to see the story behind me actually smoothing out, which is a great feeling. Still needs work, but it is better.

I’m hoping two weeks will give me enough time to smooth out this tale. I’m still hoping to get started on my fights starting in April, and that will be a whole new adventure.

The Need to Expand

Laura Highcove

So I spent most of this week on the Cinderella tale. I managed to rework some of the story and found I really needed to expand the whole ending. I always thought my writing style was pretty superfluous, because I’m so good at stretching things to get to word count when word count is my goal. But I seem to have more cases where I have clearly not written enough, or I have skipped over describing things that are rather necessary in my haste to get to …somewhere.

I’m not exactly sure what causes this phenomenon. I suppose they could be parts that I think are boring. Like when you have a scene in a TV show that you know only exists to create a baseline. The scene is not always entertaining on it’s own, but if you don’t have that baseline, then it’s not as impactful when things go sideways.

So to that end (the need to expand sections) I have been having a bit of stress. Writing new words means they’re rough and choppy and in general make me feel like I’ve taken a step backward instead of forward.

I also suck at scene changes. Getting into a scene and getting out of a scene, so I am planning on pulling out a lot of my collection of books and reading how people do scene changes so I can gain some skill in that.

I ended up not doing the shoehorning method with orange issues that I said I was going to do last week, mostly because the story ended up not needing showhorning, but reordering and smoothing. Of course that means it took far longer than I was expecting. The Cinderella tale took the entire week and it needed a medium amount of work. Now I’m on my way to Bluebeard, which I think is the most together of all the tale sections, so it might not take the whole week. Headquarters is probably similar to Cinderella, but Arthur …Arthur is going to take some serious work.

So new goal is to see if I can smooth Bluebeard in less than a week.

Colorizing Comments

Laura Highcove

So the plan I made last week ended up not working quite the way I thought it would. The idea of there being major, medium, and minor issues and such just did not work for me. I found it easier to compartmentalize the issues by making comments and coloring them (Yay Scrivener!) as follows:

Where I needed to go outside of the current tale in order to fix a plot hole or add some foreshadowing, I colored comments red.

Then plot holes and foreshadowing needed within a tale were colored orange.

Small issues like not liking a description or needing more detail I marked with yellow.

Once I had this list, I tackled the red issues first, as that required the most jumping around to different parts of the story, as well as, in a few instances, figuring out *where* I was going to put the foreshadowing. In all of these cases, I basically shoehorned in the necessary comment/description, which will need to be smoothed in on next revision.

As of now, I have all but two red issues resolved. It went a lot more quickly than I thought it would.

The plan for this week is to now go through the story and start working on the orange issues. I am going to follow the same shoehorning method as with the red issues. I am hoping it won’t take more than a week.

After the orange issues are done, I’m going to do a read through/smoothing pass and see if I come out the other side with fewer issues.

Alpha Read Complete on The Storyteller

Laura Highcove

My husband has finished alpha reading The Storyteller. From what he’s said to me (I haven’t read the comments yet) he thinks it’s a good story with all the bones and a lot of the organs it needs.

And I still find myself nervous to get it back and read it, not because I’m worried about anything he has to say about it, but because now I am about to plunge even deeper into unknown territory. I am actually going to take a story and make it readable by people who are not writers.

…

Sorry, I had to take a moment to refocus there. As a writer, of course the end goal is to have people read what I write. But it always felt like it was so …far off. And I suppose it is still far off, as I have revisions and beta reads and, you know, finding an agent, BUT I am closer than I’ve ever been before. And the next step will take me even closer than that.

And I’m scared. And I’m admitting I’m scared. I’m worried that the story isn’t as good as I remember it. I’m worried that there will be a huge plot hole I can’t fix. I’m worried that once I put all this effort into it, people won’t like it. And I’m worried that even if I manage this and it’s a success, that I’ll never be able to write anything as good again.

Oh the doubts of the writer. We’re such silly creatures. Nothing left but to soldier on in the face of all my doubts because the only other option is to give up writing, and I’m not going to do that.

Plan:
First off, I am going to read the alpha read comments from my husband. I will organize these things into three categories:

Major Issues: plot holes/foreshadowing, new scenes to write from scratch

Medium Issues: plot holes within a scene

Minor issues: Flow issues. Description.

Once I have the list of major issues, I will work on going back to fix them. I’m pretty sure most of them just have to do with foreshadowing. I’m hoping none of them are actual serious plot holes.

After that is done, I will do a read-through while smoothing out the plot, and making a new list. Hopefully it will be smaller.

Rinse and repeat until I’ve fixed all the major issues. (And the medium and minor issues should be fixed up along the way.)

I’m hoping by April I can start in on fight scenes, which I am basically leaving alone for now. I’m sure I’ll reevaluate beginning of April as well.

Remembering the Process

Laura Highcove

Now as you may or may not remember, The Storyteller is currently in my husband’s hands for alpha reading right now.

I made the decision to work on Jeremy Five-five, but I talked myself out of that after a bit, then I wandered through working on Blessings of the Nerial and to some background work on The Storyteller.

It took me until just recently to figure out why I was having such a hard time focusing on a project.

Firstly, I didn’t give myself a goal. I need to know, at least, what I am trying to accomplish in order to stay focused.

Secondly, I was attempting to work around my process. I know that my process is discovery writing, and that I have to discovery write multiple versions, and go back and tweak until I finally get an ending at which point I can actually start pulling the story together.

This is the step I am at with The Storyteller. It is not the point I am at with any of my other stories. However, I did attempt to start pulling Jeremy Five-five together and it was working out very poorly for me, then the same thing happened with Blessing of the Nerial.

This is just another of those reminders life likes to throw at me, that when things get super hard I need to take a step back and figure out why. I usually figure out that I am working against myself instead of with myself. I can’t pull a story together until I have discovery written to the end. Otherwise it’s like trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces, and some pieces from other puzzles.

So now I am back on Jeremy Five-five, with the plan to write toward the end. I am also giving myself a goal of 1000 words a day through the 29th. At that point my husband has to give me back The Storyteller and then we’ll see what wonderful mistakes I can make and learn from then!