Writing News
Snowflake Step #8
This week during my early morning writing time I worked on The Snowflake Guy’s step #8 in his 10 steps to outline your novel thingy bob. Step #8 involves much pre-planning and at first I was going to skip it thinking that there was no way that I needed to know that much about my story before writing it. But then it just started looking more and more interesting and before I knew it I had added things to his step #8 to make it even finickier than before. He wanted you to make a spread sheet and have one line for each scene in your novel and a column for scene #, chapter #, point of view character, and scene description.
Kristen Officially Finickier Than Snowflake Guy
But I added columns for all of the parts of a scene and sequel. You know: goal, conflict, disaster, emotional reaction, logic, anticipation, and choice. And boom! In one fell swoop I have the whole scene and I know whether there is conflict in it or not.
No Conflict, No Problem (I have my trusty spread sheet)
This has been incredibly valuable, for at least twice I came to a chapter and looked at all of the good stuff that I had gathered to put into it and realized that there was absolutly no conflict there. Wow. Before I would have written the whole chapter and spent several years editing it before realizing this. (I’m not kidding. I spent over 3 years editing and revising Overturned) But not this time. I knew that there was no conflict before I even set my fingertips to my keyboard. And so I stewed and steamed and found a way to add conflict. But things have gone slowly and I have only completed a spread sheet for 14 of my 40 chapters. Aw well, it will be worth it to have a reliable road map.
A Pause to Procrastinate
I also got sidetracked this week. I have been perusing this editor’s list of reliable agents that work in the Christian market and sent out 5 more queries. Queries take a long time. One of them took 2 hours all by itself. But that agent wanted 3 sample chapters within the body of the e-mail and formatted so that he could read them! Ridiculous I know, but still I pasted the chapters and went through by hand separating each paragraph by a double space. And yes I’m still waiting to hear back about that full that was requested. If they don’t get back to me by my best friend’s due date I will begin to politely hound them. As you can imagine, I’m good at that. But really it’s been over two months and I haven’t sent even one nagging e-mail. But next month…let the nagging commence!
So, there you have it. My week in writing.
