Adara VS August 2022
In today’s video I look back over my Summer Plotting challenge, including my homemade guide, in the run-up to NaNoWriMo!
Visual Description:
Visual description: Opening scene is Adara sat on a sofa. It moves a green hardback notebook with times worked and gold stars achieved every day of August written on it. Then it moves onto a large, taped piece of paper with word counts and plot beats written all over it in a timeline, before moving to flip through the pages of the plotting guide one by one.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Canopy! In today's video... Adara vs August: my summer of plotting.
I started this summer with a challenge, which was while all the children were off school for six weeks, I would try to outline the bulk of a novel. So, in July's roundup you saw that I worked on some character development, and I continued this through into August. Now, I set myself a goal (well more like a rewards tariff) so for every 20 minutes I worked, I would receive one gold star, and for every 10 gold stars I earned, I would earn myself the right to trade it in as a reward for a brand-new book at the end.
1195 minutes work including some over from last month, and that is six new books to me, which I will probably be saving up at this point until Christmas where I can buy in bulk.
I started out quite strong by recalculating how long chapters should be for an 80,000 word novel, 27 chapters, and I created the word counts for all of those. I then had a giant overhaul and a refresher of things like Save the Cat and the Three-Act Structure, and to try to get them into my head to help this plotting process, I broke them all down and I created this guide. I'm not going to go through it a bit by bit. You can kind of have a quick look at it here. I was going to upload another video about it, for copyright reasons but I've decided not to. I don't want to step on anyone's toes.
Quite happily for August I worked over 1100 minutes, and that equates to a total of 19 hours, and that all adds up! And after that for the extra two weeks to create my entire summer challenge... That all added up to around 24 hours worked in total. Let's see... I have it written down on a spreadsheet. I'm just looking at it now. Yes. 1445 minutes which was a total of just over 24 hours, and I wrote down a bit of a log of what I did in every session. Some of them are 90 minutes, one was 300, one of them was 10. It really depended on where I was, how inspired I was, and during that process I worked on my first ever dual POV book, and that includes some research into the correct dual POVS. I'm reading one where it has a lot more chapters which are shorter and swaps quite frequently between the two, and another one which is similar to the route I'm going to go down which is more of a standard 27 to 30 chapter, where each one is longer but still sticks with one main character, and then alternates as they go. So, I've spent my time getting to know those characters, in particular one. I think the other one can be a bit more flexible to give the first one more what they need... kind of the character that opens the entire story.
I now have all the main points for Save the Cat in place and my goal now is to go through this book and to write down throughout September and October what I expect to be writing in all of the chapters. Scenes themselves will just fall into place to hit the points of each chapter that I want to. I'm not so stressed about that at this point. I can write them down. And obviously this guide is not fixed at all, so while you can see in here that the Three-Act Structure can fit over certain chapters... I think that works out quite well for multi-POV. It gives both characters a chance to be able to hit those beats for their own individual stories; but at the same time not everyone works that way, and this will be subject to change because some of it I may just decide is filler and I may just pull it to tighten the thing up a bit. Will that affect pacing? Maybe, but if it tightens it and makes it go quicker then that's good enough for me. I know I roughly have things overarching in place. This is a guide to keep you through the chapters so things should roughly work out in the end where they should be.
So that's where I'm at, at the moment, and my aim is to attempt NaNoWriMo for the very first time. Will I finish it? Probably not. I have chronic illnesses. I have tried Camp NaNoWriMo before, and I've managed thirty thousand words. Anything is better than nothing, but I will give it a go. I will not be finished my novel at the end because that is typically 50,000 words is the goal. I may do less than that and I'm aiming for 80. Hopefully I should be finished by Christmas, but I would like to say I've at least attempted NaNoWriMo once, I have been doing this for... what. Three years now? And although I've done Camp NaNo numerous times, NaNoWriMo - national novel writing month - is something I've yet to do. So, I'm still stuck in plotting.
I've made fantastic headway with managing to piece things together, hopefully in a way that's not too confusing If people haven't read the first book. this one is a bit of a sequel but hopefully it can act as a standalone as well, and I'm still a bit iffy on, in terms of chronic illnesses, how much I want to embed that in. It will be a factor, but how much of a main factor considering this new main character of mine, I'm not too sure yet. I think they can be quite resilient with it. In the first novel my main character was a bit more impacted by it, not necessarily to the point of affecting the plot. I think this will have more of an impact this time on the plot, but it affects different people in different ways, and I look forward to exploring it.
So, I now have each of the 27 chapters. I know who is going to be the lead for what. I have the main Save the Cat beats plotted, and now to fill in the rest of it chapter by chapter. I've condensed a lot of this now into a spreadsheet, and I've colour coded it so I can see where each of the blocks of the thread structure are, to hopefully help me guide my way through it a bit more, and I look forward to getting on with it.
And that's it for me. I have to go now, as once again I have all those things to do, as I continue to write my story one day at a time.
Credits:
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