Vacation words
This blog post was from 2023 (I forgot to post it).
On July 31st, I was on vacation and my editor started working on Cthoma’s Fated. While my family spent their mornings catching fish, I spent my mornings catching words. My wife caught a 19.5” largemouth bass and I caught 6,000 words to add to Shroud of Whispers.
I felt like I spent more time fleshing out the dragon instead of adding new bones.
I refer to writing as building a dragon. You start at the snout and work your way to the tail. Sometimes all you are doing is adding scales with shiny new descriptions or events. You might be putting in a suture to hold things together with a brief note. Other times you are adding the bones of the story that everything else is attached to. You don’t want your other elements to hang loosely on the bones but to be a cohesive and well-put-together dragon.
With the way that I write, it is sometimes useful to go back and edit instead of forging ahead. Cthoma’s Fated was written without editing until the very end. The result was a very painful year of editing and restructuring. If I outlined then just writing might work but I can’t outline. I need to work out the details and find the pieces of the story by letting my characters stumble through it. I have found interesting characters and discovered storylines by working this way. In my new story, I found a character who almost had me drop everything to write volumes of her story. I would not have found her in an outline but by thinking through the problem that my characters are in and how they would solve them.
I think in characters and not story. Outlines are all about story with mentions of characters. At least that is how I see it. Sometimes I use an outline device to work out motivations and work through issues I find in my narrative. This is more of a stream of consciousness rather than an outline, but it does give me a glimpse into how my story-based writing brethren work. If I have multiple POV characters then sometimes I’ll work through a timeline to make sure that their actions line up chronologically, but this is after the scenes are written and not before.
