Weekly Statistics + Story Planning

Firstly, some housekeeping: This week’s writing yielded around 570-something minutes (which is an average over the past couple of weeks), and I wrote about 16k words total, and average about 2200 words per session. Not too shabby. Now, onto this change in schedule: as I said, I really have nothing to say on a day by day basis. 

I’m thinking that I’m going to update weekly with statistics and whatnot, and possibly some articles I’ll put together, where I try and be a lot more detailed about my philosophy and how I approach writing. There will also be the occasional short story I come up with on the cuff. I say ‘weekly’, but there will probably still be multiple posts a week. One guaranteed post and other stuff as I write it and think that it should go on the blog. That’s all for scheduling updates.

Now, let’s tackle the planning thing and think about how I’m going to do stuff. I’ve decided to try an experiment and attempt meditation in an attempt to sharpen my focus on my writing and maybe help deal with the procrastination thing, as well as break my addiction on the internet. Twenty minutes a day, ten in the morning and ten before I go to bed. Too early to tell if it’s going to work or not, but I’m definitely up for giving it a try. 

I’ve been thinking about planning a series I have in mind, and was thinking that I might start by throwing what I’ve already developed on paper, world-building wise, then work from there. What I need, I realize, is a framework of some sort (I talked about this at length yesterday) – the plot needs a structure for how it’s going to develop, and give me ideas about where to put certain plot points and subplots, where to introduce major characters and so forth.

But how to develop this framework? That’s the question. What is the basic plot of the this series? Our young lead becomes a spellcaster and embarks on an epic journey that leads him to face a great, hidden evil. That’s about as general and broad as I can get (and yes, fairly generic, I know, but there’s some fun twists and turns that I don’t want to get into here. Plus I love the setting). I need to get more specific. I need to decide how the events of the journey will shape the plot and how whatever the evil’s doing is going to shape it.

Maybe the plot is defined by the actions of the villain(s) – they act, the heroes respond. Their plots and schemes together form an elaborate network that pretty much drives the plot forward. Or maybe, as I talked about in another series, it has something to with the spatial relations. Draw up a map, pick some spots and send the character to them. You then have your framework for the plot ready to go. 

Or maybe there’s other machinations at work, on the part of the good guys, working against the bad (or against other good guys, if this is more of a political series) – expanded alternatively into different groups of people, with different agendas doing different things. 

The plot of a book is essentially made of events – obvious I know – and each event is caused by a character or characters doing something or another, with various motivations behind it. It’s a very abstract thing, trying to put together the basic shape and structure of the plot – is it a quest to collect a McGuffin from somewhere? Political intrigue? 

We need to define characters and their motivations. We need a establish a villain, I think. And we need to establish a few key plot events that stuff is going to build towards, and fit things in there to suit them.

I’m going to try these ramblings out and see if they bear fruit. 

Thanks for reading.