Noodling

[ellarien]

So this is the week (finally) when I work on outlining the novel. This is not something I've done very often in my writing life, and the last time was more than a decade ago in a different country. I remember jotting things on index cards and then dealing them out into a plot, but I'm not sure that's going to work this time. I have lots of index cards -- white for bits of plot, blue for background, yellow for legends, pink for characters, green for interstitial bits. Unfortunately, there are still a fair few loose ends in the skeleton of plot I have, and it's been years, and not all of what's scribbled on the cards is internally consistent with the other cards or with my more recent notions of what's going on.

There are layers and layers of history and myth in this thing, and only bits of it have ever come into focus. Somehow, I have to find the rest of it, and then fit them together and work out how to hang them on the backbone of the story.



It feels odd not to be actively writing in the sense of adding words to a draft, but I have to do some thinking-ahead sometime, and I really, really don't want to mess this one up; it absorbed most of the ideas that came to me in the drought years, at least lately.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Drafting is only a small part of writing - it's what everybody thinks of immediately, but when you look at it, you have all the other steps:

- thinking about it/preplanning
- outlining, if you do that sort of thing
- [first draft]
- revising to make sure it's coherent, which is where large chunks might get moved around or replaced
- polishing prose paragraph by paragraph

Inbetween, there might be a lot of poking at things that don't work, trying to follow plot threads etc, not to mention research...

I'm always finding it difficult to tear myself away from first drafts and do the necessary revisions.

[ellarien]

I know, but after four months in headlong first-draft mode, it's hard to switch gears!