Man, wouldn’t it be great if you had a story idea and could just sit down and write the story?
I can hear you now: “Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?”
Well, yes. Kind of…
You see, this is actually a covert update on Codename: Memories. I realized as I was working on Chapter 9 the other day that I don’t know what the timeline for the story is. Time and memory are important sub-themes of the story, so it kind of surprised me when I realized that I didn’t know what year the chapter was flashing back to.
Whenever I write a story, unless specifically called out, it takes place in Present Day. There will probably be some details that those paying attention can use to ascertain the specific time of a story is taking place. But I try to keep it somewhat vague so that (hopefully) the story feels timeless.
However, just because I don’t specify in the story doesn’t mean that I don’t know. That, along with character details, setting details, nuances, mannerisms, and the weather are probably in my notes.
While I never thought of myself as a planner, I most certainly am. The details of the plan vary depending on the length of the story. As alluded to earlier, the shorter the story, the easier it is to keep all the details of it straight in my head. However, I usually have notes for short stories as well, even if they are just beats I want to hit in the plot or some character detail I think is interesting.
When I started working on Clean Freak, I wrote about 60 notebook pages of notes, including a draft of the first chapter, before sitting down at my computer. The first several chapters were roughed out in the notebook prior to committing them to Word doc.
I’ve been writing Codename: Memories from minimal notes. As I’ve said before: one day in January, I was struck by inspiration and sat in a hypnagogic state for about 30 minutes while I experienced the story. Hurriedly, I wrote everything I could remember down in my Notebook app. I was going to call it a day after that, but the thrill of creation still burned in me, so I took those notes and broke the plot beats out into chapters, which I then made more notes about as more details occurred to me. Not wanting to lose the thread of the story, I started writing it that day.
The chapters were thin, mostly focusing on external action and dialogue. I decided to press forward because I wanted to write a first draft and write The End on something. I’ve talked before about that being important to me.
But something has been bugging me through this draft: it is a rough draft. In fact, I’ve referred to it as Draft Zero, which is how rough I think it is.
Because, you see, I thought that by just pantsing the story, I was skipping the work of plotting the story. But as I’ve been struggling with the quality of the draft and realizing that I don’t know a lot about my characters or even when the story takes place, I realized that I’m still going to need to do the work of plotting. But I will be doing it in the second draft.
It’s a different way of working. This experience has taught me that I think I prefer the 60 pages of notes.
-/-
The Chimerical Dark 