Tag: plot

update on the novel

Ughh…….

Alright, in the tradition of last year when I would write until 2am every night and then blog on it before going to bed, here is another update on how Bringing Estella Home is going right now.

It’s getting tougher.  I’m right in the middle of it right now, in chapter 7, and I’m not sure whose viewpoint I should do next or how I should be organizing these chapters.  I’ve got four viewpoints, but really there are three separate subplots going on, and I need to give them each equal time while structuring them so that the tension builds from one to the other.  When you don’t know what your chapter is doing in relation to the novel as a whole, it’s difficult.

My readers in English 318 tell me that one of the most interesting things in this story is the culture of the antagonists, the Hameji, and that’s really good because I want it to be interesting.  I’ve created a sort of ruthless, cold-hearted, irrationally violent barbarian culture, and over the course of the rest of the novel I’m going to show exactly WHY they are so violent, what drove them to it, etc.  Sound familiar?  It’s my Mongols in space idea, and it’s coming along very well…

…except that I didn’t have Ben’s part figured out very well.  He’s the one who gets brainwashed and turned into one of their soldiers, given a drug that melds his emotional being with that of a collective–kind of like the borg, but only with feelings and emotions, not with thoughts.  It will be interesting to play with that idea, but this chapter, which was originally supposed to focus more on his experience with that transition, just…didn’t work out as well.  Not a lot of screen time for him, for some odd reason.

So I did a little bit of thinking as I was walking home today.  I thought to myself, “if I were a Hameji commander, how would I train these guys?” And it worked out very well!  I think I know what I need to do now, what Ben’s story is going to be for the next couple of chapters.  That’s very good.

Man, going for a walk can really help you sort things out and figure out what happens next.  Even though I have an mp3 player, I rarely listen to it as I’m walking to and from campus.  Many times I have my best ideas while making the commute.  If/when I become a professional novelist, I’m going to have to set aside time each day for long walks.

Finally, I’m a little worried that I’m falling behind on my deadline.  I wanted to finish this thing by the final exam day, sometime in April, but now that I’m sludging through the middle, I wonder if it might take longer.  I have the climaxes figured out very well, but I’m still a long ways away from them.  I might not finish this novel until the end of May, especially since I’ll have to do some major revisions of the first three chapters to hand it in for the English 318 final.  That won’t give me a lot of time to revise my novels for World Fantasy 2009…

Bah.  There is so much to think about.  Rather than deal with it now, I’m going to go to bed.

Quick update

Just a quick update on what I’ve been up to, since I don’t write often enough on this blog anymore.

The past week was really busy–at least, it seemed to be, because I was constantly doing things. Whether those things were productive or not remains to be seen. However, I’ve broken the 37,000 mark on my novel, and moving along steadily. Things going fairly well there.

Still, I figure I’m about a week behind where I’d like to be in the novel. Still on the first chapter of part II. I had to do a lot of thinking and conceptualizing to figure out what needs to happen next, but I’ve come up with a plotline that I find really satisfying. Now I just need to write the thing. 😛

Life, the Universe, and Everything has been going on these past few days, and it has been AWESOME!!! I don’t know if I can emphasize that enough! Tons of writers, tons of interesting panels, lots of interesting people…it’s been great! I went up to the first panel at 9:00 am (a panel on being LDS and writing SF&F–the challenges, the strengths, etc. Skipped a class to attend it), and honestly I did not leave the Wilk until 8:00 pm. How crazy is that? The only hour I wasn’t at a panel of some kind was 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm. It was tiring, but definitely worth it! I’m so glad I went!

More updates on LTUE later. In fact, I’ve recorded just about every session I’ve been to, and plan on recording the rest, so if there’s enough interest I may post some links to the recordings on my site. I have my own hosting, and I’m fairly sure that my hosting service can handle all the bandwidth and other issues, so if you guys are really interested, I’ll put them up for you to download.

I’m a little bit worried that I’ve been too shy this conference. Since I plan on going to World Fantasy 2009 to sell my novels there, LTUE is good practice for approaching editors and authors and other notable people within the publishing industry. All morning, though, I pretty much kept to myself, kept at bay by sheer awe from all of these awesome people–however, by the afternoon, I figured out that it does absolutely no harm to shake hands with someone in the hallway and compliment them on something they said on a panel you attended.

So that’s the approach I plan on taking tomorrow, more for myself and to get used to talking with these people than to actually try to sell anything of mine. Because really, even with all the famous writers, there aren’t a whole lot of editors or publishers here. A handful, but mostly for YA, and that’s not what I write.

I’m sooooo looking forward to tomorrow! Another long day of SF&F awesomeness!

Worldbuilding

This is what I was doing the other day.  The FLSR (Foreign Language Student Residence) at BYU has chalkboards in the common rooms, and I just discovered that those can be WAY useful for diagramming your story.

On this occasion, I drew out a couple of space battles, according to how they’d play out with the FTL technology I’ve been thinking up and a few other things.  I worked things out logically and figured out a few basic rules of combat–some basic strategies that you can expect people to follow.  I then took what I know about the Hameji, the main antagonists in my novel, and figured out how they would use their special abilities to counter these tactics.

Pretty fun.  Now, when I go back and rewrite the beginning, I can make the opening space battles feel a lot more vivid, immediate, and engaging.

I finished part 1 of my story last week, and now I’m at the beginning of part 2.  I’ve got the novel roughly outlined out in my head, and it’s following fairly closely to the three act structure.  Not exactly, but pretty close.

According to Brandon Sanderson (and several other people), act 2 is the most difficult part of the story.  It’s where  you need to do the “blue collar work” of simply sludging through and writing the thing.  It’s where things get complicated enough that you can get lost if you don’t know how to plot things out.  Considering the fact that I’ve only gotten this far with two other novels I’ve written, I’m expecting this part to be really difficult.

Only 599 words today, and none on Sunday (more because I was feeling sick than anything else).  It really is getting easier to get hung up on a single scene; even if I know where I want to be three or four chapters from now, if the scene right in front of me isn’t working out, it’s almost impossible to move past it and get things to work.

Today I took a big piece of butcher paper from upstairs and drew a diagram of everything I’ve written so far, scene by scene.  That was immensely helpful.  Now I know what this chapter is about, what I need to do to bring it to a natural close and leave a hook for the next few chapters, and how to develop my characters and what they’re doing.

While taking a shower, I figured out what Estella needs to do next, and how to take her story over to the end of act 2 and carry her to act 3.  That’s something of a breakthrough.  I’m excited.

And…it’s late.  I’d better get some sleep.