“Before beginning, prepare carefully” Marcus Tullius Cicero

In my last post, I may have mentioned that I am beginning to work on my second novel. Yep, that’s right! Second one! Now, don’t get excited. The first one was terrible. It shall remain locked away from all sunshine until I need a reminder of how far I’ve come in this journey to becoming a decent writer.

My first experience with writing a book was really an exercise in persistence. Essentially, I was hoping to accomplish a couple of things. Firstly, to get in the habit of writing a couple thousand words per day. For those of you wondering, this is actually not that difficult. If you’re really focused and know what you’re wanting to say, you can do it in relatively little time. My second accomplishment with the first project was to spit out some of the ideas I’ve had floating around in my head for years. I knew they were not all going to work, but it felt good to put them down on paper.

Now that I’ve gotten all that out of my system, I’m ready to begin my second project. This time, I want to be really thorough in my pre-planning. Since I have such limited experience with this, I’m just kind of trying things to see what works. Here’s my current timeline:

January/February:  World-building

This includes lots of lots of research. I love it! I can watch a documentary on Netflix and include it in my notes for my book! Woot! In this phase, I will also be creating the places that exist in my story-world, the social and political issues, and any characters associated with important places (not main characters, I don’t think).

March:  Plotting

My thought was that if I could create a world with an interesting set of social and political conditions, as well as create the places and people that exist within, I should be able to see some possibilities for plots that might be fun to explore.

April:  Character Development

During this time, I’ll want to put a lot of effort into figuring out who my characters are and how they interact with the stuff going on in the world that I made up. 

May:  Plotting revision/Goal Setting/Beginning Writing

I’ll probably begin this month by doing some plot revision. I want to make sure that my plot and characters all fit together and that everything makes sense in my head before I get going. Then, I’ll figure out my scene guide and make goals regarding how much writing I’d like to accomplish each day. I should be able to figure out how long it’ll take me to write the whole book.

June: Writing!

Writing, writing, writing. Oh, and more writing.

After I finish a draft, I’ll probably let it sit for a few weeks, then begin to revise. But I’m not there yet. I’m excited to get started with this current project. This approach is the polar opposite of the approach I took to the last novel. I did absolutely no planning for that. I mostly just sat down at my computer each afternoon and surprised myself with what would happen next. That was a lot of fun, but it didn’t yield a discernible plot. Maybe after I do this, I’ll be able to work somewhere in the middle of pantsing and OCD planning.

The important thing is to keep practicing. I feel good about that.

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