Thursday, November 17, 2011
First Drafting
Anywho, I'm working on a new book, and I'm really excited about it. TSA is waiting to be critiqued so all I can do is work on this new project. I call it PiP. It's young adult with a slight paranormal twist and is written with dual POVs and in 1st person present tense. Basically it's the complete opposite of TSA.
The main characters are twins, Ellie and Elliot; their lives are destroyed when Elliot gets kidnapped and murdered. Ellie doesn't know how to live without him, and lucky for her Elliot comes back as a ghost -- only he doesn't know he's dead and he doesn't remember what happened to him. Then more boys start going missing and it's up to them to put the pieces together in order to catch the killer before anyone else gets hurt and before Ellie becomes collateral damage.
Yea, it's gonna be intense.
I started it right about the same time NaNo started, and I broke 11,000 words last night. I'm happy, considering I'm not participating in NaNo. Hopefully it'll be at least 60k when it's completely finished, but I have a feeling the 1st draft is only going to be about 40k. I'm a bare bones writer, so I'll have to go back and flush a lot out.
I usually don't make an outline, but a few thousand words in I got completely stumped and couldn't do anything but keep going back over the stuff I'd already written, so I broke down and made a very, very vague outline. It has twelve chapters, but each chapter has 3 parts to it since Ellie and Elliot take turns telling the story. Basically the outline looks like this:
Chapter 1
Ellie @ funeral
Elliot comes home
Ellie tells Elliot the truth
And eventually the little pieces get a tad more descriptive, but for my purposes I just needed to know the absolute basic progression of events. It really helped me for this one, because I'm not really sticking to the outline (I've already changed a handful of things), but it allowed me to see the general story arc without ruining the thrill and surprise of writing a first draft by the seat of my pants (which is usually how it works for me).
If you've been following for any period of time, you know I'm a half-ass outliner. I don't want to know details, but I like to have a vague idea of my story. I like to be able to ignore what little bit of an outline I have and make things up as a go without worrying about how it fits into the story as a whole, but I like having a rough guide to my plot as well. I highly recommend the half-ass method. It's the best of both worlds.
So that's what's up with me. I have 11,000 words of PiP's first draft (I'll share the full title eventually lol) and I couldn't be more thrilled with it. How are things with you? Are you NaNo-ing it up?
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2 comments:
I was doing nano, but then life got in the way. Now I'm working on the story at a more reasonable pace.
I like the idea of NaNo, but it's not something I can do. Sorry it didn't work for you but glad you're still making progress! :)
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