I have a couple of days left in my writing and drawing challenge, and I’m really happy with how it’s going.
This is about as much consistency as I can manage, which is not in the same league, at all, as the people who do NaNoWriMo or Inktober in their original form, but a tiny bit of consistency does go a long way.
The continuity of coming back to the novel every day makes it easier to get into the story each time. My brain is simmering on the novel in the background, even when I’m not working on it.
Here is a video update where I’m drawing one of the settings of my novel. It’s one of the few settings that I can say, with confidence, will appear. I won’t say much about it! I want it to be a surprise.
Writing Update: Last time, I was on my third pass through the story, working on the plot Q&A. Today, I spent a little longer than planned and made it to the end of story! The third pass is done, so I’m going to have to figure out what to do next.
I could continue pretty much as I have been, just go back to the beginning and just keep refining.
Or I might spend some time organizing all the material I’ve generated so far, turning those Q&As into actual scenes, or bullet points, or something that I can basically use to do the actual writing with.
This challenge will be done soon, so I want to figure out the organizing principle for the next round of edits. Will it be another month long challenge? And should I jump into it straight away?
After this is done, I’ll take a couple of days to go through everything I’ve done and then decide.
And of course, the new year and planning ahead got me thinking about this time last year, which was a lot like now: cool weather and editing.
About a year ago is when I finally figured out how to do novel revisions, and edited the first section of the novel. It’s crazy to think that a whole year has passed since then! And what a year it has been.
Here’s a video update where I’m drawing a potential setting for my novel. At first, I sketched in a few characters for scale. It got me thinking about coming back through these drawings (in a later challenge, no doubt) and drawing in the characters!
I’d have to design them first. I haven’t figured out the details of how they dress or do their hair. Those will be decisions for later, after the more important ones have been made.
My focus this time is just the settings because I find those especially helpful in helping me visualize scenes while writing descriptions.
As for the writing itself, I’ve been going through the story in passes.
To recap:
The first pass through the story I did was just reading the draft, because I hadn’t read it in a while. I had just been adding to it without reading it for months.
The second pass was creating a new outline, and here’s how I did that:
I started with a timeline, listing month one, month two, month three, and so on for the (in-story) passage of time. And listing all the main plot points that from the draft. They were written, but still needed work.
Then, I began a round of Q&A, where I’d go through each plot point and ask myself, what I didn’t like about it. What needed to be added, why the different characters did what they did – all sorts of missing details.
It was easy to first frame them all as questions. But I also added answers as best as I could, you know, whatever hints of an answer I had. So the second pass was just basically doing that for every plot point until I reached the end of the story.
My questions and complaints took thousands of words to write! It became really clear why I’d had this vague sense of dissatisfaction with parts of the story.
While brainstorming possibilities, it became clear that any of these answers would probably be fine. There isn’t one best way to solve this problem. This is my story and I can kind of do whatever I want! As long as it sent me in an interesting direction, I could already sene that the story was getting better.
It was reassuring. It wasn’t about choosing the best answer, but delving into the plot points until I found them convincing.
Most of this detail is probably not going to make it into the final book – I don’t know which parts will and which parts won’t, but all of them are getting me closer to being able to tell the story well because I believe it.
After Q&A-ing my way to the end of the story (with the amount of clarity tapering off toward the end since the answers would depend on earlier story beats), I started on my third pass through the story.
I just went right back to the beginning of the plot point Q&A, and read my answers, asked followup questions, and answered whatever.questions I could.
At some point, I will have to stop analyzing and get drafting. More background detail isn’t always better. Hopefully, I’ll catch myself when I get to the point where I’m just outlining and outlining as a form of procrastination.
But I haven’t got to that point yet!
Here’s a nice little picnic spot for my characters!
Here’s another novel update, where I focus on the writing piece of my project and shared some recent drawings with magical and fantasy themes.
My focus was listing out the scenes in the second act of my novel and troubleshooting them.
For every scene, I need to know some pretty basic things like, well, what happens.
And usually I do, even though there are occasional gaps in the details.
The next question is why each of those things happens. There needs to be a good reason for it to seem plausible and work well with the plot. So, I’ve been asking “why” that for every plot point.
I found that usually, I already have an answer, or even many answers. So, it becomes a matter of picking the best answer, or strengthening it.
On occasion, I’ve had a plot point, reason, or thought process for one of the characters that didn’t rung true. To make it stronger, I’ve been following a process similar to outlining, except I’m creating an outline from chapters I’ve already written, rather than before my first draft.
The outline is made up of the plot points I pulled from my draft and my brainstormed answers to all the “why” questions.
Since scrolling through my giant manuscript can be overwhelming, I started a new blank document to have a relatively uncluttered place to work. I made a timeline to order the outline and started off with some freewriting about my impressions of my recent read-through of the draft, before going into the Q&A.
It was interesting to see the range of questions and doubts I had about the story. I had some complaints about aspects of the world building, or a character’s personality, the tone in some places – a jumble of things that felt vaguely off. It was good to identify them and tease them apart.
Between brainstorms, I often walked away because I didn’t know what to do next. A day later, the solution occurred to me while I was in the middle of something else, so I ran to capture it via voice memo.
That was encouraging! It’s convinced me that it’s worthwhile to just identify these problems, list them out all on one page where I can see them, and then give myself time to go off and have ideas.
The fantasy-themed drawings I shared the making of in my video.
Another InkPrepNoWriCember update, this time about environmental stuff!
Here, I’m making a drawing for a collaborative art project I’m doing with an environmental group. The drawing is about ways to be strategic about environmental action, and new metrics we can use.
Specifically, alternatives to the idea of our individual carbon footprints.
A lot of people try to strategize their environmental action by minimizing their carbon footprint. And this isn’t bad or anything. They’re basically trying to affect the economy, through their market participation. And the hope is that enough people do this, that the market for environmentally unfriendly products dries up to the extent that companies feel incentivized to make these changes.
The problem is the carbon footprint as a metric leaves out a lot of avenues for action by focusing entirely on your buying decisions. And that is one way to influence our collective carbon footprint (which is what actually matters).
But it’s not the only way. And arguably, it’s not even the best way.
The other problem with optimizing your personal individual carbon footprint is that beyond a point, any action you take is just a form of perfectionism without making much of a difference to our collective carbon footprint.
As you probably know, the changes we make as individuals have a much smaller impact than changes made by governments and corporations. So our individual choices in consumption only matter to the extent that they affect governments and corporations.
Our perfectionism about our carbon footprints is awfully convenient for big corporations.
Researchers Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes write: ‘The very notion of a personal “carbon footprint,” for example, was first popularized in 2004–2006 by oil firm BP as part of its $100+ million per year “beyond petroleum” US media campaign.’
So the overemphasis of personal carbon footprints has basically been a way of deflecting focus from the parties really responsible.
And the changes that we need need to come from governments and corporations, among other entities.
And we might be thinking, Well, I’m not a government or a corporation. So what can I do?
And what I’m trying to express here is that there’s actually a world of possibilities of things we can do. We have influence over governments, corporations, culture, or social groups. And we knew that we had influence on them through our buying actions. But there’s also other ways.
For example, companies care about their brands, and so they care about your opinion of them. So expressing that opinion affects them, and incentivizes them to change. And likewise, voting, speaking to representatives, speaking to other voters, all of these types of advocacy, have an influence on governments and society and culture at large.
So I think a small tweak in how we measure ourselves and what we optimize for when taking environmental action can make a huge difference.
And whatever progress the environmental movement has made, it has been made by groups of individuals working together. If we’re more strategic about it, just imagine how much more effective we could be and how much more progress we could make.
So that’s what I’m trying to convey with this drawing.
The version I made in the video ended up a bit overworked, so I went back and took out some of the lighting effects I went overboard on.
Novel update: I finally finished reading my draft. I read it more or less backwards – I started with the last few chapters than the middle at the beginning.
As I got closer to the beginning, the writing got better and better, which was encouraging, because I’d spent a lot of time revising the first portion of the novel. It was so much better than the rest, so now I’m excited to repeat the same process on the remaining chapters.
So that’s what I’ll be doing next. I’ll be reacquainting myself with the editing process I used on the first chapters, and making a plan to apply it again.
I cam across an article by Temple Grandin with the highly inflammatory title Against Algebra, and with commendable open-mindedness for an algebra fan (tosses head), I actually read it. It’s good. I recommend it.
The point of it was not that learning algebra is bad, but rather, that we shouldn’t make algebra a requirement for continuing to learn mat, because there are people who could be good at math but struggle with algebra specifically, because they’re very visual learners.
The part that caught my interest was this quote:
There are two types of visual thinkers. Some visual thinkers, like me, are “object visualizers”—we see the world in photorealistic images. Many of us are graphic designers, artists, skilled tradespeople, architects, inventors, mechanical engineers. “Spatial visualizers” see the world in patterns and abstractions. They are the music and math minds—the statisticians, computer coders, electrical engineers, and physicists.
I’m not sure about the division by professions (especially because I think lean toward the second type, but my jobs suggest the opposite). But the description as ‘photorealistic’ vs. ‘pattern’ struck a chord.
I have trouble going straight from a mental image to a description in words. That made it difficult to write descriptions (well) in my novel. When I tried, it felt like the details were blurring, moving around, or becoming bland.
But I can go from a mental image to a drawing just fine! So maybe I was skipping a step. I decided to use drawing to support my novel efforts.
It worked out pretty well – definitely fleshed out the scene far more than I could in my head. So, I’m hoping to keep this going. I’m not planning to draw every scene, because at that point, I’d be making a graphic novel. But just enough drawing to, you know, kind of get into the atmosphere.
And I think it’ll be fun to have these pictures up while I’m writing for inspiration! More to come.
A mystery setting that may or may not make it into the story.
Do you find that working in one medium can help you in another? Let me know in the comments!
