Starting Monday, I’ll be participating in a “Round of Words for 80 Days,” a friendly goal-setting group that challenges participants to set any word-related goal and to stick to it for 80 days. Coincidentally enough, that 80 days will be long enough to get me to the brink of time when I can write more or less focally on my “Haunted High School” novel, which is just in time for Round 3.
My goals for Round 2 is to write 1,000 words a day initially on prep materials though once a scrap of dialoge, description or drama starts to creep in, I shan’t hit “delete.”
80,000 words of prep materials? That’s longer than a successful NaNo. There are a few twists I want to deal with which I’m sure I’ll discuss as the project goes along. I’d love to start actual drafting but in the least, I want:
==> Full character descriptions of the major characters — I find it MUCH easier to write believable dialogue when I really know the person who is speaking. It’s often the case that actual dialogue starts to appear as I cobble together a character description so this might not be entirely unusable backstory
- Brandon
- Caitlyn
- Robert
==> Good Enough descriptions of the supporting cast — Yes, of course, everyone in a book needs to be fully rounded but the supporting cast appears largely to present problems for the major characters, just as grown ups are around largely to get in the way of what teenagers really want to do, right?
- the Computer Teacher,
- the English teacher,
- the Science teacher,
- the custodian,
- the community assistant,
- the principal,
- the assistant principal,
- and of course, the ghost
- and the ghost’s wife
==> a “snowflake” outline of this book — Randy Ingermanson has the idea of fractal outlining where the shape of the whole is, in a sense, recursive throughout every part. In the least, his strategy is to start with a one sentence description of the whole novel, then to expand it to a whole page and on and on. Kind of clever and it avoids the problem of writing just one thing after another, which is great for a journal but a bit rambling for a novel.
==> A spreadsheet of scenes based on the NaNo draft – I need to see what I have already and to see if any of it can translate to the project I’m attempting now.
==> A comprehensive timeline of what each of the three major characters are doing at any given moment. — Why? More on that later.
Now I’m off to figure out how to add the “Linky” for A Round of Words… Can’t be TOO hard, right?