In my last post, I wrote that I am trying to formulate a writing process for myself, so that I can write more on purpose. It’s not so much that I’m doing something new or different; rather, I’m doing it intentionally.
As I’ve been warming back up to the story, I’ve been working in the notebook. Only speaking for myself, if the story you read is the part of the iceberg you can see, the notebook work is everything below the surface. It’s the place that I can dump all my thoughts as I have them, without needing to put everything in order. It’s where I hit the plot points of a chapter. It’s also where I’m working out my writing process and applying it to writing this story.
So here are the updates:
I’ve roughed in 14 chapters. This means that I have major plot points of those fourteen chapters, which gives me a rough outline that I’m able to (hopefully) follow for the whole story.
I’ve also outlined chapter 3 in more detail. While I write stuff down in the notebook as they occur to me, I prefer to actually write in chronological order. So I’ve got the major plot points of chapter 3 broken down into beats. If the plot points are the events, the beats are how we get from event to event.
I had already started writing chapter 3 in March, before I got distracted by my newest short story. Coming back to it and outlining the chapters, I realized that I wanted a scene before the one I had started writing in March. No worries. I cut and pasted into another document, which I will bring back over once I get there.
But it’s going well and I’m enjoying the new process. Or I should say the intentional process.
The Chimerical Dark 