Update on my new process

19 May 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

I'm a month and a half into my new process and I've learned some things. I finished the storyboarding phase and now I'm writing the first draft! It took 1.5 months which I feel like is a big win because the first draft last book took 4 months and I still didn't have the story nailed down until at least the second draft, maybe later.

Storyboarding

The first thing I learned was that storyboarding was a success … but not really for the reasons I expected. You can read about my goals for the process here, but basically there were three:

• Quick iteration
• Feeling of discovery writing
• Something short to show to people to get feedback

Actually, on all but the second goal, it was a complete success. I was able to iterate quickly and I changed the story so many times, both little and big changes. Things changed so much I had to constantly read the current version of the story to keep it straight in my mind. I was also able to show it to three groups of people more than once and it got better every time. It took about an hour to show it each time, but that's much faster than them reading a whole book.

However, for most of the time it didn't feel like discovery writing. It felt like outlining. And at the end I realized that that's all my "storyboard" was. It was just an outline. I had hoped that by getting down into the details on the storyboard, it would feel like writing the story, but it was hard to get myself to make decisions and imagine the story without having written any of it yet. My natural tendency is to have to write the first half of the story before I get clarity into what happens in the second half, so this was hard for me.

Forcing myself to do this, however, created a much more powerful ending. I'm not sure if I'll be able to overcome the weakness that outlining has of having flat characters.

In conclusion, I wrote an outline, but in a format that is easy to show to people and I discovered that outlines help you iterate quickly. I'm still going to call it a storyboard to make myself feel better.

Test-driven Writing

I tried my idea of test-driven writing, but as I started writing tests—or goals—for each scene, it felt redundant. If the outline talks about advancing the storyline of character x, or especially if the scene is all about that, then it doesn't make sense to have a test/goal for that.

The more I followed that line of logic, the more tests dropped off my list for each scene. I ended with a small list of emotions that this scene should hit. The exercise almost felt futile at first, but then I reached a moment of clarity.

In creative writing, the real test of each scene is whether or not your writing struck a certain emotion with people. It's all about the emotions. This discovery gave me a very focused set of goals that I feel like are really going to help me write this story.

Now, this is just my feelings working with my own story. I'll still need more examples and thoughts from other people and from doing this multiple times, but for now, this is what I'm running with and I'm so excited for it.


So lastly, I've started writing the first draft. I'm giving myself four months (the time it took to write the first draft last time) and my hope is that I'll need fewer drafts before I get a killer story. We'll see if taking 1.5 months to storyboard will save me 4 months or multiple 4 months. Wish me luck and I can't wait to share more about what the story is actually about!