Writing Log; 8/31/09

Started at 10 am (dropped kids off at school, loaned lawnmower to neighbor, cleaned up a bit)

10 am to 10:30 am: Created a Scrivener file for Illyria novel, creating placeholders for chapters and scenes, accompanied by synopses. For each scene, included notes describing how that scene is intended to advance or provide information about character, setting, and plot. Noted weak areas in current conception. Most of this process involved reviewing, copying and pasting content already created my master outline for Book One of the novel.

Wrote on and off from 10:30 am to roughly 2:15 pm
Got in about 2.5 hours of writing, give or take. Wrote roughly 1850 words, spread between three scenes. Would like to improve to at least 3 hours of writing in this time frame, more words on the page. But this is a start.

In some cases these scenes may expand into short chapters, but the general sequence of the outline will probably hold up.

The bulk of the writing was in Chapter 1, scene 1, and it was very shaky. Descriptions too flat, pacing uneven, didn't have a good visual image of the surroundings or a clear enough feel for the scene. A few good ideas crept in, will need some revising. Too much emphasis on setting, not enough character development taking place along with it. (Going to pick up the kids at school, came up with some ideas of how to start the scene differently and have the protagonist, point-of-view character interacting immediately with other characters to jump-start things.)

Fortunately, laying out the framework for the first nine chapters, including placeholders and synopses of the planned scenes, made it relatively easy for me to jump to a different scene and keep working with a noticeable improvement in quality. Wrote a decent chunk of Chapter 4, Scene 1, using one of the versions of chapter 1 for last year's failed caper novel manuscript as a welcome inspiration.

Also wrote a couple hundred words for the opening of Chapter 5, Scene 1. Just a little visual description of a setting element, but another detail came to mind as I was writing it and I like the results so far.

So I ended with a much better feeling than I started with. I think I will continue tomorrow with more of Chapter 4 and perhaps move to some other scenes that I have a better feel for before I go back and try to hammer out Chapter 1 again. Need a better image of what that city looks like, a lot more little descriptive details to color in the background, and a stronger presentation of Dahvo's character.