Writing News

This week was more productive, sort of. I finished chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 in the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, but I didn’t use the material from every chapter in my manuscript. Chapter 13 was “Public Stakes” and I did use the exercises in my story. Chapter 14 was titled “Complications” and I put  a bit of new material into my story because of this one. Chapter 15 was “Plot Layers” and while I did the exercise I did not use any of it in my story because at the size it is now, if I add any more plot layers I’m going to be in trouble length wise. Chapter 16 was “Weaving a Story” and surprisingly, after doing the book work I realized that my weaving of the plot layers had turned out well and there wasn’t anything to do that I could see. I did get a good idea for weaving in a character complication in the next book, which I wrote down on a note that hopefully will eventually make it into my “Ideas” folder on my computer. Chapter 17 was “Subplots” and again I ran up against word count constraints, I don’t have enough room to add any subplots. Also, my story is told in first person, so a subplot would hardly be appropriate since you never jump into any other character’s heads. So I zipped through quite a few chapters but not all of them were incorporated into my manuscript. A good week though.