Update on the novel in progress
Last time I wrote a post here, I was gazing at out of the window towards my olive grove, which requires my attention. Well, not much progress on the olive tree front, though I did some pruning at the weekend. Today it’s raining hard and the temperature has dropped. After a long hot summer and an early autumn of still, clear and sunny days, the weather pattern may have changed. I just hope we don’t get hit by the severe winter the northern hemisphere is slowly emerging from. Anyway, today is a good day for writing, and on that front I have made progress.
Since my last post my site has had an update, more of a rearrangement than anything else, and part of the reason for that was to put my blog on the front page so that it’s easy to find. I’ve also changed the content of my posts to talk about the novel I’m currently writing so that anyone who’s interested in the process of writing can see how I go about it. This novel is a Stuart Harrison story, which means the Black Sun series I was writing as Stuart C Harrison has to take a back seat for now, though I hope to get a new, full length book in that series out by years end. Okay, so where am I up to in the process?
I keep banging on about planning, and that’s what I’ve been doing while the site was getting a facelift. I’ve been using a writing software program called Scrivener, something I’ve never done before. So far it’s working pretty well, but rather than spend a lot of time here describing what it does and doesn’t do, I’ll simply be talking about how I’m actually using it at any given time. Right now, I’m using it for organizing my novel plan. Essentialy Scrivener allows me to break down the story into little pieces such as scenes, synopsis, acts or whatever I like, including random notes, and keep them available on a single screen. As the novel plan becomes more complex, this is extremely useful.
So what is a novel plan, anyway? Well, it’s a road map of where the story goes, which is pretty obvious, and it includes information on characters, setting and what actually happens; the plot. I talked in an earlier post about the world where the story takes place, and this is the starting point after the actual inspirational idea for the overall story. The world isn’t the setting exactly, but rather the background to the story. It’s whatever has happened before the story begins, that forms the underlying motivation for the actions of the characters. Remember, I’m talking here about my own writing. I use methods I’ve worked out from my own experience, as well as those I’ve learned from books. Everyone has their own ideas, this is my take.
The idea behind the story I’m writing was this: I wanted to write about a relationship between a man and a woman, so a love story if you like, but I wanted the story to be dramatic, in the sense that the relationship struggles because the characters are driven by internal motivations that work against the relationship succeeding. So in novel speak, that’s conflict. The only other thing I knew about the story at this point was where I wanted to set it. That was easy. I decided to make the setting the Isle of Man, which is off the coast of northern England. I chose the island because I once spent a summer there in my early twenties. Some things happened during that time that I’ve never forgotten. Writing is catharsis, however well-disguised. Sometimes anyway.
Next step then, once I had the idea, was to start thinking about that particulars. I decided I wanted to make the relationship story part of another story. This is the surface story which provides the events that bring the people together and bring out the conflict between them. In that surface story, my protagonist is an undercover detective who is temporarily attached to the intelligence service in order to glean information about a possible threat to the Northern Ireland peace process.
When I got about this far, I started thinking about how these two stories would work together. Where’s the link? Who is the woman? What is driving these people? It’s not the surface plot, that’s only part of it. Although the surface plot is the outer world where events take place, it is the relationship between my two main characters that I’m really interested in. I need to know what really drives them, what events in the past have formed their characters. In other words, what defines them and sets up conflict that must be resolved by the end of the story.
About there, I went to bed. It’s like putting the casserole onto simmer. Let the juices blend and develop flavor. Something always happens then. It could be a scene, or a facet of character or just about anything, but something occurs to me and that’s what I start working with.
More next time.
