Battle Plan
January 18th, 2010
After a week of boozing and blasting, I’m one night’s sleep away from tackling this novel again. I wrote the first draft straight through from beginning to end, but now that I’m going back through it, I’m taking a different approach. There are four primary characters around which the story is centered. For the next month, I will be devoting a week to each different character’s section. In addition to just simply improving the writing and fixing some things, I’m also going to try to give each of the four sections a distinct feel apart from the others. But I want the differences to be subtle with an overall cohesion still firmly intact. I’ll be playing with a bunch of different ideas and techniques to accomplish this.
During this period I’m also going to scrutinize every single element of the novel. I’m trying my best to get outside of the project and look at it objectively. I want to divorce myself from everything I’ve come up with so far and question it all. Is this the right way to do this? Is there a better way? Is this cool enough? I want every single word to have a purpose.
After going through the four sections, I’m going to then map out the entire novel in terms of information bits revealed to make sure I’m dispensing data very precisely. I’m trying to do a lot of things to make this novel dynamic and complex, but above all I want to tell a great story. I want the plot completely airtight, without a single hole. And I have to be able to commit to everything in this novel for the rest of the series, because I’m determined not to write myself into a corner. I’m almost completely inexperienced at this sort of thing, so I’m going to make up for it with brute force and careful planning.
After that I have a few different processes planned that I anticipate will take a few more weeks. I’m hoping to have this thing about 98% done around the second week of March. Then I’m going to find someone to edit it for grammar and bleed it out with red ink while I begin working on the internet series. The goal is to have a very sharp manuscript to shop around by the middle of April, and the first part of the Internet series ready to go by the time summer rolls around.
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