{"id":6315,"date":"2008-01-25T11:37:54","date_gmt":"2008-01-25T17:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/2008\/01\/25\/a_milestone_in_my_writing\/"},"modified":"2008-01-25T11:37:54","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T17:37:54","slug":"a_milestone_in_my_writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/2008\/01\/25\/a_milestone_in_my_writing\/","title":{"rendered":"A Milestone In My Writing!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>When I first became inspired to write a book series about King Arthur<\/strong>, I started out by brainstorming and writing down everything I could think of regarding the story and the characters involved.  This composted for a number of months.  Because my story had historical elements, I also did some research, but not <em>too<\/em> much.<\/p>\n<p><strong>After that, I wrote a sample chapter,<\/strong> right out of the middle of my book. I picked that spot because:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I didn&#8217;t have to worry about all of the back story.<\/li>\n<li>I didn&#8217;t have to worry about getting that opening paragraph just right. <\/li>\n<li>That particular series of scenes was especially exciting to me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>So I wrote it out.<\/strong> It was refreshing and gave me some orientation, and the first sense of the voice that I would use in the novel.<\/p>\n<p><strong>After that, I didn&#8217;t write again for at least a year.<\/strong> I did a lot more research, honed my outline (via <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.advancedfictionwriting.com\/art\/snowflake.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Randy Ingermanson&#8217;s Snowflake Method<\/a><\/strong>), and fleshed out my characters. Part of the reason that it took me so long is that I was mapping out a potential five book series, and so the research &amp; design of that was very in-depth.<\/p>\n<p><strong>After my outline was done, then I started at the beginning and wrote my prologue<\/strong> (which I am constantly improving), and then moved page by page through the book.  <\/p>\n<p><strong>I am now at 62% finished with a projected finish date of July 6th.<\/strong>  Yes, this has slipped a month, but now that I have been logging my writing for awhile, it is less likely to change as I have better picture of my average word-count per day.<\/p>\n<p><strong>But the biggest news is that three days ago I made a major milestone!<\/strong>  <\/p>\n<p><strong>What was that milestone?<\/strong>  I have FINALLY gotten to the point in my novel where I was able to integrate in that &#8220;first&#8221; out-of-order chapter that I had written two years earlier! It is amazing to see that at least 80% of it was usable.<\/p>\n<p><strong>It is also amazing how little my writing voice has changed.<\/strong>  It melded in perfectly with the previous chapter.  Now that is not to say that it didn&#8217;t need editing!  It needed plenty, with many plot related issues, as well as the fact that I have learned how to write more tightly.  I still have a tendency to slip into a passive voice, but I am getting a lot better.  And the accents!  I hadn&#8217;t yet figured out how the characters would speak, and so I had to remove a lot of the accent.<\/p>\n<p><strong>So do I recommend writing a chapter &#8220;out of the blue&#8221; like I did?<\/strong>  Emphatically, <strong>yes<\/strong>!  Even if you are not ready to begin a book in whole, it is a valuable exercise and can give you a proverbial stake in the ground (during all that world-building and research) that you can go back to, re-read, and say, &#8220;Yes.  Here is the proof.  It is real.  I can do this.&#8221;  <\/p>\n<p><strong>Do any other authors do this?<\/strong>  <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.lbgraham.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">L.B. Graham<\/a><\/strong> just did it with his new book series, and you can <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/lbgraham.com\/blog\/lb.php?title=a_new_start\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">read his post about it here<\/a><\/strong>.  <\/p>\n<p>Coincidentally, he posted about it on the same day that I began the process of integrating in my own &#8220;first chapter&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Views: 42<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-summary\">\nWhen I first became inspired to write a book series about King Arthur, I started out by brainstorming and writing&hellip;\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/2008\/01\/25\/a_milestone_in_my_writing\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &ldquo;A Milestone In My Writing!&rdquo;<\/span>&hellip;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13,14,41,48,28,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-merlin-spiral","category-1-merlins-blade","category-blog-reading","category-l-b-graham","category-on-writing-fiction","category-progress-reports","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p67v0M-1DR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}