After one full-week of ROW80 (Round 4), I’ve made some steady progress towards my writing goals. It feels so good to be writing with determination and consistency again. At first, I was worried that my month-long hiatus from writing might be a hindrance, but ever since the round started I’ve been energized and driven again, as if I never missed a beat. Maybe I just needed a break. Or maybe the enthusiasm comes from starting anew with clearly-stated writing goals (see right column). Regardless the reason, I’ll need every ounce of optimism and determination I can muster, because this round is going to be very challenging, mainly due to the definitive deadlines imposed by NaNoWriMo during this round. As you can see, the month of October is dedicated to outlining my NaNo-Novel, which I must have ready in three weeks if I am to succeed this November. Last year during NaNoWriMo, I wrote over 50,000 words (winner!) towards my “Sword & Sorcery” universe, using it as an opportunity to brainstorm future story-ideas. So, instead of writing a complete story last year (as is traditional in NaNoWriMo), I worked on the fragmented story-ideas that I had in my head, writing imagined characters into random scenes as I explored and discovered my story-world. Because of that writing exercise, I now have multiple story ideas to choose from this year as I prepare to go the traditional route of NaNoWriMo (actually write a complete story form beginning to end). But that’s gonna take a lot of planning, so from now until the end of this month, I will be frantically putting together a coherent (hopefully exciting) story-plan so that I can go into November confident and prepared. Over the past few days I’ve been perusing through books on outlining and plotting, jotting down notes and setting up my Scrivener file. I’ve divided my story file into acts, created files within those acts for the important plot-points and pinch-points, and files evenly distributed between them for story development. I use the index-cards and document notes inside Scrivener to plan out the major story milestones and to keep track of all the elements that need to be in each scene. I’m really enjoying this plotting process right now, but with only three weeks to go, I need to light a fire under myself to get this done before time runs out (ah, yes — the “ticking time-bomb” analogy). Speaking of which, I need to get back to my outline (…tick…tick…tick…tick…tick…)
Keep the Fire Burning!
Please visit the other writers in the ROW80 Community…
It sounds to me like you've got this! You are so much more organised than me! How are your finding Scrivener? I use to use it but I work on multiple devices such as my phone, tablet, laptop and desktop. Scrivener just didn't work for me across platforms.
ReplyDeleteI love Scrivener! It's the only way I can organize my chaotic notes. At work, I write notes on my mobile device app and synchronize it to the Drop-Box cloud-service. When I get home, I copy-and-paste my mobile-writing from Drop-Box into my Scrivener file. That's how I deal with multiple devices.
Delete