Book Done Yet? Prewriting Progress

I have nothing to be ashamed of this week in Book Done Yet. I worked.

The first thing I did was take the jpg of my old collage from several years ago . . .

. . . and use it as the center of my updated digital collage along with some icy river and forest pictures to get the setting right. Right now it’s mostly cast with a few extras thrown in, but it’s a good start and it feels like the book:

So that’s in progress. Then I did the cast layout for the three times they were at the house even though the book only has the last time, 2007. I needed to see them all to understand the backstories, most of which will never hit the page (NO FLASHBACKS EVER. Thank you).

And then I started thinking about the house, which is the setting for the whole thing and realized that I needed a better floor plan, so when I should have been cleaning my office I took this old floorplan off the net:

And made this:

And then I tried making a diagram of the plot and realized it was back to the drawing board. Well, to the graph paper and Curio. Argh.

But still, progress.

Thursday Night Update:

So after the Day from Hell and before I start on the tax info I should have done weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about story in general and plotting in specific.

You need a structure for your plot or it goes all over the place. But you also need the juice, the stuff that just bubbles up as you write, and it’s the tension between the two of those necessities that shuts down a lot of writers (that would be me).

Tonight I was trying to think what makes this story different. I’m very happy doing an Agatha Christie homage, but like any other classic story/trope/cliche, if it’s going to work, I have to make it my own. But I can’t do it for the gimmick. “I know, we’ll set it in Antarctica!” No. It has to be something that grows out of the story. A couple of years ago, the story took a big leap forward for me when I realized there were ghosts, something I discovered by writing a scene in which one showed up. Once I started extrapolating from that scene, wonderful things happened, but they still didn’t make it Good. It was Good Enough, which isn’t good enough.

So now I’m thinking about what everything in this story means, juxtaposed together. What patterns emerge in meaning (not structure, this is linear structure) that are going to give me my next nudge. Because right now, I’m trying to figure out the turning points, and I know one for sure, and it’s a beauty, but after that . . .

It’s seeing the big picture, the meaning that every makes together, that’s the next step. Which for me means going back to the collage and to Curio to put the elements into boxes that I can move around to see the patterns of meaning. I have these marvelous characters and one terrific turning point, but they’re all standing around in the dark until I can see what they mean.

So next week on “Book Done Yet” . . . enlightenment (fingers crossed).

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