I’ve been working on a novel for a few years now. Not the YA Pyromancer one that my Rewriter’s Block posts followed (that one’s gonna be on the backburner for a while). This one’s a trope-bending comic fantasy and even after three years of work I’m still utterly in love with it and I know in my bones this novel will be The One I see through to the end and hopefully debut one day.
There’s just one problem with it.
I struggle with plot.
For a writer, struggling with plot sounds like a potentially career-ending problem. My favourite way to work is to dive in and write scenes as they occur to me. I love those quiet character-building moments gathered at the campfire, or wandering around my protagonist’s house and scattering little clues about his personality. But making them fit together… doesn’t always come naturally.
Hero (working title) has seen a lot of changes. It’s had three different antagonists, characters have been cut out and re-added and the tone fluctuated wildly as I figured out what I wanted the novel to do and the subjects I wanted to delve into. Subsequent “drafts” involved starting a new document and pasting in all the scenes I knew I definitely wanted to keep… then… writing some more bits around them. Draft 4 was the big goal this year: 80k completed by the end of June, something sturdy and closer to the finished product. But I got to 50k and finally admitted to myself that this method wasn’t going to work anymore. I had a fairly good idea of the third act and a decent first act, with not that much in the middle. Having generally considered myself a pantser, the thought of planning it out didn’t feel like much fun.
I always recommend Janice Hardy’s writing resources for whatever stage of novel-writing you’re in, but this article was especially helpful. She explains how an editorial map can help you write your novel, and this is what I’ve been working on for the past month. Hero is a complicated novel. The two protagonists have their own character arcs, the antagonist is generally “off-screen” doing dastardly things and I really needed to know where everyone was. Everyone’s novel has different needs but I made a column for each important character (with extras for arcs where applicable), story questions, secrets revealed, and “stuff referenced later”.
Draft 5 is not ready just yet, but I’m feeling much better about my first act already. It’s much quicker to plan scenes and change them later than dive in and then have to rework everything. I’ll be posting updates now and then just to get my thoughts out and see if I can figure out a better process for getting this thing written. I have written 3 novels before (2 novel-length Doctor Who stories and Pyromancer) but this is the most ambitious. And feels the most “me”. Hopefully switching up the method will yield some interesting results…
Thoughts?