Okay, I was getting really hung up on this at first. I mean, I had this fabulous idea for a novel, yet it took me months to write a chapter. Why? Mostly because I love editing, perhaps to a scary extent. When I write my story, I edit as I go, and the computer only encourages this. Sad? Yes. But still: What to do???
Well, this week I went on vacation where I thought (wrongly) that I wouldn't have any access to a computer. To continue writing on my story, I took a notebook along and plenty of pencils and erasers. Then, as soon as I had spare time (like an hour block) I wrote.
PRE-NOTES
First thing I did was to write a prenotes thing on every chapter. This includes three things:
SUMMARY
Do a short three sentence summary of your chapter. What happens? What characters are in it?
PURPOSE
At first I didn't do this, but then I realized, if I was just writing nothing, then it would be really bad. What were my intentions in the chapter? This also meant I got to delve into any symbolism I was writing. That way, I could be sure that my writing was somewhat orderly.
WHAT'S HAPPENING?
This is essentially the outline of the summary. Put what happens in chronological order.
The pre-notes was very short... less than a page, typically.
WRITING
Then I wrote. I tried to write without stopping, and I didn't edit. If I felt the incredible urge to edit, I would write in the margins about what I could do. I didn't erase. Instead, if I hated something, I put a line through it and continued as if nothing happened.
Once when I was writing chapter 14, I messed up really bad. I mean, hideously bad. So as soon I realized what I was doing, I put a large "STOP!" where the story left off, briefly told myself what sucked, and then restarted.
On the whole, I wrote without stopping though. A typical chapter took about two hours to write (by hand).
POST-NOTES
Once I finished the chapter, I reread it and looked for obvious errors, marking it either by a line underneath the guilty word or a note in the margin. Then I wrote a post notes thing for the story.
A post notes is basically what a critique is for YWS. I wrote what I liked about it, what I hated, and then I tried to brainstorm ideas about how I could fix the criminal errors. Some of my ideas were horrible, but since I wrote it down, it crystalized the problems in my brain and I was able to think of better ideas on the 14-hour car ride home.
So...
What I found out from this experiment is that if I don't edit constantly, I can come up with some pretty sweet stuff. I can focus on one chapter at a time without missing out on the entire story, which is very important to me. Furthermore, I wrote THREE chapters in four days, which is more chapters than I usually churn out in a month! I will not lie... one of the chapters was absolutely terrible, but by doing the notes before and after like I did, I was able to diagnose it.
All in all, the experiment worked and I am definitely pleased with the results. Will I do this again? Definitely.
Happy writing!
Gender:
Points: 3891
Reviews: 3821