Velocity Blog 01

This blog will come once a week to discuss what I’m working with and on while writing Velocity: In Search of Eugene.

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VELOCITY BLOG 01

What does it look like to write a book? I think there’s no one answer to that. There are a hundred different ways to cook an egg and there are three times that to start a book.

Books start as ideas that are as shapeless as some scrambled eggs and what we have to do is make some sense of the scramble. What did my egg look like before I broke it and set it to cook in a pan? Now that I have scrambled eggs, do I want ketchup and salt and pepper? Do I want a side? What about something to drink? All these in and of themselves are individual ideas that come together to make a meal that I can then share with others. But now that I’ve beat that analogy to death how bout I tell you how to scramble some eggs?

I’ve gotten into the habit of mapping my ideas out, either on a whiteboard (thanks Microsoft Whiteboard) or in my sketchbook. The complicated nature of plotting out a book isn’t always as easy as saying beginning middle end, especially when it comes to a multi-book series. Usually I have some sense of a plot point or a character or a theme I want to dig into.

The Kinetics Sequence has gone through multiple types of changes over the decades, but as I began plotting out the major arcs that would then become the individual books one thing was always important to me. I want each book to be it’s own thing. While yes, each book would have to be read in sequence, the book could in a way stand on its own. Book one is road trip story, book two is a training montage, book three is a “fish out of water” type of story, and now I’m on to book four.

I churned out my ideas on this whiteboard last year, not long after I finished writing #3. This week I will be doing a very vague map out of book 5, the final book in the series. Because moreso than any of the others books 4 and 5 are closer than anything.

I have three sets of characters at this stage and each set of characters have their own character arcs that I have to consider. Willow is the primary POV in this book, where Eugene has been the primary for all the previous books, with the others popping in as needed.

What I don’t have mapped out here is the various scenes that I have in mind. That’s where I will begin the first version of Velocity. You may have noticed that I wrote Victory or Hope sequentially, that is not my standard way of writing. I tend to write out of order, jumping between chapters with reckless abandon. The interesting thing about Victory or Hope is that I wrote a very solid 17k word short story a handful of years ago which I used as the basis for the second draft that you all got to read. It was easier to write sequentially because I already had everything figured out.

I call this version the skeleton draft. The skeleton draft will consist of these things:

~ Pivotal Scenes

~ Dialogue snippets

~ Messy outlining

The pivotal scenes are things I have in mind that are usually character defining moments, an interaction, an action, or a moment of introspection. I daydream quite a bit so these things come to me while driving to work or in the shower or watching a movie, etc. I have notes for what these scenes are but nothing is fully written out.

More often than not, I outline in dialogue instead of in procedural steps. Something about dialogue helps me navigate the story beats I want to hit so I’ll use these snippets to lay out the path through the story. Unlike the scenes, I will only write the dialogue instead of the actual SCENE. Interestingly enough, if you look at my earlier writing or even initial stages of my writing, there will be a lot of context missing from around the dialogue, because in my brain of brains the dialogue tells me everything I need to know, and sometimes I forget that not everyone lives in my brain and can see what I see. This is why we have editors.

The final thing will be actual outlining. The aforementioned procedural step-by-step.

In some writing circles you’ll find people talking about being a plotter or a pantser. Plotters dig into the procedural. Pantsers eschew the plot for just letting the story carry them through that. I like to think of myself as one of those who call themselves plotsers. I toe the line between plotter and pantser because I set out a basic outline and then I let use that only as a guideline to carry me to the end.

In my operations there is extreme folly in sticking too close to the outline once principle writing begins. As I’m writing, inspiration takes hold and new ideas come out of the woodwork. Being able to accommodate those new ideas is hellishly important.

It keeps things fresh and it allows my skills to grow. Where I’m at as a writer at the beginning of the project is not where I’m at near the end of the project. I’ve written a whole book in between Book 3 and now, and I’ve already learned so much more.

As I begin putting together the skeleton draft I’ll also be in what I call sandbox mode. I’ll be pushing ideas to their logical conclusion, trying to see if I can break my own story or create plot holes so big that you could hide Jupiter in them.

Sandbox time is always a fun time, it’s usually where I spend a lot of time playing the story out in my head and on paper feeling out the edges and playing with the nuances. It’s also where I take an idea I’m stuck on and challenge it.

I have an idea in the big sandbox in the sky for a story I wont be actively working on for a couple years yet and it persists in being stuck. Eventually I’ll figure it out but know I can workshop ideas that way means writer’s block is a thing of the past.

My goal is to have a readable draft by the end of the year. Even if it’s not in as a fleshed out shape as it could be I’d like to have something that I can give to an alpha reader.

Here’s my current to-do list. Each blog post I’ll put in bold what I’ve completed. And don’t be surprised if things move around or add or delete.

Skeleton Draft
-Scenes (9000 words of scenes done, still have more to go)
-Dialogue
-Outline

THANKS for reading!