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Daily Archives: July 3, 2010
Daily Archives: July 3, 2010
I’m strict about the structure of my books. I tend to write too much, so I limit my number of available chapters as a way to limit my word count. I cheat, at times, by sticking 7,000 words into a chapter that’s supposed to only be 5,000, but if I start to have a chapter with a 9,000 or 10,000 word count, I know something HAS to go. If I can’t cut the scenes there, I have to cut in a chapter before or after and shift scenes up or down.
That’s the bare bones of the book structure. Muscling over the bones, I also have a plot/character structure. In addition to the main plotline, which is Dindi’s, I give a different set of secondary characters their own plotline in each book. In Book 1, the secondary characters were the widow Brena, her love interest villain-hero Rthan, and her hypocondriac daughter, Gwenika.
In Book 2, the secondary characters are Kemla and Tamio, who are scheming together, à la Les Liaisons dangereuses, against Dindi, and Finnadro, who wields the Singing Bow.
Each book also has its own series of “flashbacks”; these aren’t really flashbacks, but a third major plotline told out of chronological order to the rest of the story. In Book 1, that plotline followed something that happened twenty years ago to a mysterious girl called the Corn Maiden, which Dindi discovers through ongoing Visions throughout the story. Of course, the events of the past turn out to be critical to her story as well.
In Book 2, a major villain is introduced, and he searches out Visions that will ultimately lead him to kidnap Dindi.
I’ve been working on Dindi Book 2, operating on the idea this will be a Quartet.
First off, I dragged every scene I’d ever written into one file. That gave me about 80,000 words right there, but the order was haphazard, some whole chapters were duplicates, there were the wrong number of chapters overall — in short, a pretty mess.
Using my post-it note outline method, I culled through the draft chapter by chapter. I removed duplicate scenes. Each book in the Dindi series is to have three sections of seven chapters each, for a total of twenty-one scenes.
Altogether I have a minimum of fourteen new scenes to write. Since one of those is a newly beefed-up battle, and another an all new climax sequence for the book, it will probably be more like twenty to twenty-five new scenes. Not to mention every other scene in the book has to be re-written. I need only change a few details and polish the style in some cases, but many other chapters require substantial re-writes. I’ve left them in now as place holders, because the new versions will probably have a similar word count.
Altogether, I have to write about 30,000 words worth of new material, and re-vamp another 40,000, then go back and comb the tangles out of the whole thing.