Category: Fiction

Day 27 of my writing and drawing challenge

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!

…breaking it down and building it up again

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.

* * *

What do you do when you’re stuck on a project?

This is my day 5 update to InkPrepNoWricember.

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.

The Atlantic

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.

Do you find that working in one medium can help you in another? Let me know in the comments!

Here is a video update on what I have planned for the next month!

For writers and artists, the end of the year is always an exciting time, because you have Inktober, Preptober, and NaNoWriMo – fun, collective challenges to share progress on.

This year in October, I thought about doing Inktober, because I was already doing a lot of drawing and illustration projects. And when November came around, I thought about doing a modified version of NaNoWriMo to revise my novel (NaNoWriMo is usually for first drafts).

But in both cases, I – well – didn’t. There were too many other things going on!

So now it’s December. And I figured, what if I mash Inktober, Preptober and NaNoWriMo together into one month?

I also drew this picture of what it’s like with all the projects coming and going. Exciting and chaotic!

More updates to come!

And if you have a way of working that seems weird and unconventional, but it works for you – let me know about it in the comments! I’m always curious about the ways that people work.