So far my July Camp projects are not going as well as I hoped, but I refuse to give up. There’s still more than half the month left for me to get this NaNo party started for realsies and I know that I’m capable of busting out word count like crazy in the time left. I’m feeling a bit better about it now that I actually updated my word count (thank goodness for being able to edit the count by day!).
This week I’ve been thinking about Project 2, the editing project, which I’m continuing to drag my feet on. Part of that is due to the fact that when I open that Scrivener project it reminds me of how much has to change.
That novel is the second NaNo novel I ever finished and I was definitely a card-carrying pantser at the time. I think that was even before I bothered with lazy outlines. (To clarify that one, I consider my outlines to be “lazy” if I go back to them later to find that the whole outline is a few bullet points like “There are characters. They hang. Then something happens. ??? They do stuff? Adventures??? In the end they go home.” As opposed to my more detailed outlines which, while being kind of tongue-in-cheek, still contain useful details to work with. Such as this one from the outline of the current arc of my webserial: “Risa gets a call (a real one, with a phone) from some dude (whatever his name is)”.)
I still find pantsing my way through writing a novel to be enjoyable and I probably wouldn’t have finished that book if I hadn’t let myself have fun with it, but I do see some flaws in the process I used while building that story world. Especially now after two complete story arcs (plus extra scenes, plus incomplete third story arc) of my webserial have expanded on that world and what happened to the characters after the novel.
While writing the original novel and even in the beginning of the serial, I used a lot of lazy world building (I use the word “lazy” with love when referring to myself and my processes). Lazy world building meaning: if it was something about the world that I hadn’t already figured out and it wasn’t super relevant to what I was writing at the time, then it was to be ignored or hand waved away.
I made locations when I needed them without thinking too much about spatial relations or if it really made sense for there to be a city in that country where the guards were super hands-off (it didn’t). I had a lot of fuzzy ideas about places and concepts in the story world that I didn’t really elaborate on. Like how characters that came from other dimensions had IDs and apartments and such. Or whether or not the government was aware of them. I also didn’t have a clear sense of the timeframe for what was happening.
Which was all well and good while pantsing a novel since it maximized the time I spent busting out word count instead of thinking and researching, but it turned out to be the opposite of what I wanted while writing my webserial. After stumbling around my fuzzy story world in the early parts of the serial, I spent time doing some serious world building to fill in the gaps.
I have a timeline that stretches from centuries before the current time in the serial to over a thousand years after. I’ve got better descriptions of the places and a better sense of the relative locations of cities to each other. I have descriptions of the characters and a hair/eye color cheat sheet. I’ve still got some fuzziness in there (namely with distances and how long travel between places should actually take), but it’s definitely better than before. I still make some stuff up as I go, but there’s a much more solid foundation to build on.
The downside is that now that I’ve put effort into making a coherent world for the serial to take place in, the original novel has huge problems. Parts of it just don’t make sense anymore (they probably never did) and it seems like a monumental task to fix them. A large part of the drama and tension of there being people searching for one of the main characters just doesn’t make sense now that I’ve worked out that the government would be involved and, thus, they would already know where she was going to school. That search should have ended in, like, two days instead of a couple months (or whatever amount of fuzzy time was involved). There’s more like that, too.
I’ve started tackling it by going chapter by chapter compiling a document of the inconsistencies and problems that need to be addressed. I also have to go through the serial to find the references to the events in the original novel so that I can write those down as things that absolutely need to stay.
It’s slow going, but I think doing this will better prepare me to fix the novel once I get to the stage of rewriting and reworking it. I’m almost halfway done with rereading the chapters and recording the inconsistencies (I’m counting all those bullet points as word count) and it’s already given me some insight into how the book should be structured. I might have to rework the timeline, depending on what information about it has been recorded in the serial.
It’s all totally doable; I know it is. I just have to focus all of my yoga-sourced “everything will work out; you are enough” energies into staying positive about my writing projects. July hasn’t beaten me yet!
Skyebun Studio 