After a rest of about a week after my recent trip, I went back to my drafting but there was no juice to it. So sometimes towards the end of last week, I decided I would remake the WIP into a scene by scene summary on index cards.
Why am I doing this and what do I hope to get out of it? Well, one thing about the WIP is that I currently have a block of old scenes when my extensive outline was made in not quite but almost two years and then a block of new scenes added through the iteration of my decimal drafts and the successive rounds of structural analysis. Not surprisingly, the new scenes are not as well-formed and sometimes I’m struggling to see where a particular scene is going to fit amongst the actual draft I’m working on which is full of meta-writing and notes to self which bounces between the last scene and the current scene at the point of writing but then no longer applies after the addition or amendment in a later round. Therefore, the thought emerges to turn everything, old and new scenes, all into the same form: index cards.
Then, hopefully, I can pull up specific index cards and see what is going on within there. I am going slowly with this because there is really no point rushing and get down all the wrong things about a scene. So I am doing 2 chapters per day, 5 days a week. I am up to chapter 10 from the current draft and I’m doing a bunch of new scenes that I haven’t yet integrated into the draft in a different colour. The WIP currently has 85 chapters so this exercise will occupy me until the middle of August. I am hoping that it would give me greater clarity and fast track my progress with the WIP so that there will be more positive news for my September update. Stay tuned.
Moonlake's Fiction Space 