My chapters are getting longer
Oct. 10th, 2009 03:49 amMonash Drive - which I've renamed "The Monster that Ate Constitution Avenue" - is coming more and more alive.
I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I'm not going to be able to make a chapter every day, let alone make the published chapters the final version.
But it's fun.
I have a rough plot of the overall stories in my Circa notebook, so I know where I'm going and how the characters are going to interact for the rest of the book. On a strategic level. For each chapter, I'll put down a few actions and thoughts and then write that chapterwhen I get to it.
Recently I've been finding that I can't get through everything I'm planning for a chapter in a thousand words or so. The characters are doing their own thing, walking away with thecstory.
Case in point. The coin. It was just something Quint picked up. I didn't know what it was myself until a few chapters later. It could have been a medal. It could have been a piece of jewellery.
But it was a coin, and things startedto flow from that. The date. Who put it there. Why. And from that coin, I now have another one, two gunshots, a dead body, and somebody called Elfie, who may prove critical.
I'm enjoying writing this. And my readers are telling me they like it.
I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I'm not going to be able to make a chapter every day, let alone make the published chapters the final version.
But it's fun.
I have a rough plot of the overall stories in my Circa notebook, so I know where I'm going and how the characters are going to interact for the rest of the book. On a strategic level. For each chapter, I'll put down a few actions and thoughts and then write that chapterwhen I get to it.
Recently I've been finding that I can't get through everything I'm planning for a chapter in a thousand words or so. The characters are doing their own thing, walking away with thecstory.
Case in point. The coin. It was just something Quint picked up. I didn't know what it was myself until a few chapters later. It could have been a medal. It could have been a piece of jewellery.
But it was a coin, and things startedto flow from that. The date. Who put it there. Why. And from that coin, I now have another one, two gunshots, a dead body, and somebody called Elfie, who may prove critical.
I'm enjoying writing this. And my readers are telling me they like it.