Yesterday I finished the first draft for Segment Two of Driftmetal. I’m now setting that aside and moving forward with the second book in the Aionach Saga, which I’ve been itching to get back to for weeks now. With the plot broadening and the POV characters’ stories overlapping in time and space, I’ve decided to try something different with this book: outlining.
Usually I write in a very free-flowing way. I develop my ideas over time, pulling in the various elements I want to use and mixing them together. It’s kind of like making a salad. And since I’m a thinker, I’ll often spend hours or days pondering over a particular plot element to make sure it makes sense and fits within the story. I don’t care what you’ve heard about flavor combinations; I’m not putting gummy bears in a caesar salad.
As this series gets larger and more complicated, there are an incredible number of details to keep track of. I left several loose ends hanging free in the wind at the end of the last book, and it would be easy to just forget about a minor subplot if I didn’t keep copious notes. But keeping everything from grammar rules and vocabulary for each of my made-up languages to quotes and character descriptions in a single word processing document is becoming unwieldy. Time for a change.
So I’m experimenting with the infamous spreadsheet of character and time, which I’ve seen several writers use and which I think will benefit me in the long run. It works like this: the story’s timeline and chapter numbers go down the left-hand side. Characters and events, along with what they are all doing, go across the top. That way you can have every major plot point available at a glance, so you can make sure that everything happens when it’s supposed to. This will be the first time I’ve ever used anything aside from a quick bulleted list or a hastily-typed memo in my phone’s notepad app to do any plotting.
My ultimate goal is to spend all the upfront time doing the pondering – making the ingredient list for my salad. When that’s done, I won’t have to worry so much about choosing new ingredients, since I’ll already have the previously-assembled list to work from. I’ll be able to just write, and (hopefully) write faster.
It took at least eleven full months of writing in earnest to finish The Infernal Lands, which topped out at around 240,000 words and ended up being more like 220k after edits. Of course, I also took breaks along the way to write The Shepherd (22k) and Driftmetal: Segment One (45k). I’ll try this new method on for size and see if it speeds things up. Currently I’m averaging around 1,000 words a day, even on days when I have to hold myself at gunpoint to get there. I often end up writing more than that, but I hit a snag every time I have to stop and decide what comes next. It remains to be seen whether some more detailed outlining will change that.