Getting it right!
I have typed THE END on my current work-in-progress! The original idea for this story came in November 2016 while Peter and I were staying at Robertson in the Southern Highlands. We went to the beautiful Old Robertson Inn for dinner on a cold misty night. We were sitting in the lounge before dinner and I had a vision of a boy falling off a ladder outside the window. I wrote my ideas for a story on the back of the menu.
In July 2017 I enrolled in the 30-day Bootcamp course at the Australian Writers Centre. Each day you receive an email with a set word count or some other task and the aim is to write 10,000 words during the month.
I set about writing my words each day in cafes and libraries and was pretty excited when there were 8000 ish words at the end.
The three Sophie books were finished at the end of 2017 and it was time to write this new story. Sophie’s books were written from the beginning of book one, through to the end of book three. With the new story I wrote a 200 word scene, a 600 word scene, 1000 words of something else that came into my head and so on. None of it was in any order whatsoever! It took me over a year of chipping away at the story to put it into some sort of narrative arc. I thought it was looking good but discovered massive plot holes and chapters which needed to be deleted or merged together. It wasn’t working at all!
After seeking advice from a writer friend and Peter I knew it was time to let go of the original idea, which had made the whole thing too complicated and then it happened. It all fell into place and I knew I had to rework the whole thing, using most of the words I had written with a less complicated storyline. It was pared back to just under 6000 words and I wrote THE END within a couple of weeks.
This story is now sitting in the ‘bottom drawer’. It may come out later but the sheer relief of typing THE END was incredible. I learned important lessons while writing this book. This is not the way I write books. I need to start at the beginning and work through to the end. I need to write chapter outlines. I need to plan it!
Hardly surprising, as I do like a bit of order in my life.
Related posts
