Hump Day Slump Day

Today was not a very productive day in some regards. My quantity of work has not been great. However, I have made a couple of new discoveries about my writing process. These breakthroughs are often more important than smaller changes involving a particular story.

So, as I've said in previous posts, I'm a discovery writer. I spend the majority of the beginning of my writing process actually writing where other authors would spend their time in the beginning planning. That being said, I am now in the planning stages. Maybe I work backwards but it works. My project at the moment is creating a time line of the events in my story, so I can make sure everything makes sense. Well, I've made a number of different attempts to create a time line. At this point, I'm too far into the story to be able to remember the dates and times of all of the events that take place. On my last read through, I took notes on the events in an attempt to create a time line out of my notes. However, after looking at the six pages of notes I took, I got really paranoid that I had left things out. Which I had. So, tonight I decided to go through and highlight every time I mention something that happens and the time reference to go with it. All of this is to say, I finally figured out how I could make sense of the events in my novel enough to create a time line out of them. And this is one of the most important aspects of being a creative...figuring out your process. The only way to do this is to try a million different things over and over and over again, figuring out what combination of tactics works best. So, I'll take a new discovery about my process!

Another revelation that hit me like a ton of bricks but made me smile: I can see my setting. For real. There are two ways you can write setting in any story. You can base your setting off of a real place, which means you have to know the specific details of the geography of that place. The other way to deal with setting is to make the whole place up! This is the route I chose. So, I've had to make it up and make sure the geography makes sense just like the time line. Well, tonight I'm reading through my novel, and I can see these places I'm writing about clearly in my mind. I can see them like I'm looking at a picture of some place, only it's the place I created. Part of my job is to make sure you, my many adoring readers, can see these places as clearly as I do. I would say my writer's group would agree I'm doing a good job in this regard, but I'm going to ask them specifically on Sunday.