76,806 Words

Sometimes things just come together for you. The book I just wrote was like that. Not so much the ending, which I changed three or four times as I went, but just the way the book came together as a whole was great. I’ve got a couple of Works In Progress that are like pulling teeth. To have one whip together so fast and so clean from a start with so little to go on was really fun.

This manuscript – tentatively titled Watching Uru – was something I did for the Camp NaNo National Novel Writing Month event for August. About a week before we were supposed to start, I thought I’d give this idea a try. I’d had a series of re-occurring daydreams involving a particular character. These daydreams mostly resolved into individual scenes, but they weren’t necessarily related, and I didn’t have a central premiss. I wasn’t at all sure this was going to work.

I opened up a spreadsheet and put each scene on a row in a particular column. There were about twenty of them, all told. I then looked for something that might be chronological about them, something that might be a theme, and anything even remotely resembling a plot. To my utter amazement – it had it all, and didn’t even have any scenes that had to be eliminated due to timing or logic conflicts. Everything could be made to fit.

I then added some scenes as connective tissue and fill in, numbered everything in the order in which I thought they should appear, and did a data sort to automatically put it all in order for me. I love spreadsheets for stuff like this.

I then went through and added approximate dates to show the chronology in a different column and in another put in what point of view the scene should be in. Normally I would go on to add GMC and emotional arc information for each scene, but my week was up, so I skipped it and went straight into the writing.

A few days later, I’d had some ideas for the way things should go, and certain details had an impact on the plot, so I went back to the spreadsheet. I removed some scenes, re-arranged a few, and added a few, all while still keeping my word count high.

I went through the same process two more times before finishing the book. At the end I mostly just winged it. My word count got slow, but it wasn’t worth messing with the spreadsheet again. Finally, I thought I was right at the end, so I put aside everything else in my life to focus on finishing. I pushed hard, but couldn’t finish it in one day. I finished it the next day.

If only all the books I write would come together so easily.

So that’s why I was so slow getting back to you a few days ago. My head was totally in a different world. Now I’m ready to get back to… um… reality? 🙂