Step Seven: The Daily Grind (20k)
Story Shapes, Name Changes, Tracking Word Counts, and an Honest Look at How Things Are Going
This post is part of my paid Craft series delineating the 22 Steps of a novel’s lifecycle from concept to publication day, following my journey as I write my new novel, #HLN. Start here if you’d like to follow along in order, and be aware there is a paywall below. Thank you, the Management.
We’ve reached Act Two of this series, the most vital part: the day-to-day work of laying down the words that will eventually be edited into a novel. For fear of it devolving into the dreaded saggy middle, I’m breaking it into its own series of acts based on where I am in the book. My plan is to write an essay at 20k words (Act 1), 40k words (Act 1.5), 60k words (Act 2), 80k words (Act 3), and 100k words (Act 4). I’ve just crossed the 20k mark, and feel like this part of the series is ready to begin.
First, a small celebration. Twenty thousand words! Seventy pages! There is a story brewing. When I hit 25k, that’s when I really lean in and say okay, you’re rocking and rolling. The 100-page mark is a watershed moment for me. That’s not only when it feels like I’ve really got something, but when the shape of the novels usually becomes clear.
Wait a sec. Your novels have…shapes?
Yes. I like thinking of story in terms of shapes. It’s the story’s basic structure, and determining the narrative shape gives me a good idea of what the story will look like both structurally and thematically.
I’ve had an ouroboros (Lie To Me), infinity loops (Tear Me Apart), Celtic knots (Good Girls Lie), DNA strands (It’s One of Us), even nonsensical chaos (Her Dark Lies) though when the scribbled lines were stripped away, it showed a maelstrom that became a funnel. Down, down, down into the story I went until I realized I was caught in the vortex between Scylla and Charybdis (literally, the island is home to Scylla’s cave), and everything made sense.
The shape of A Very Bad Thing—an octagon—came from John McPhee’s wonderful writing memoir DRAFT NO. 4, in which he talks at length about the myriad story structures he’s learned and utilized in writing for the New Yorker. I couldn’t figure out what I was trying to do with so many characters until I saw this little graphic:
When I applied the name Columbia Jones to the X and put the names of every person (POV character) whom my journalist, Riley, will have to talk to to get a complete story about Columbia, poof: the shape of AVBT is an octagon.
These visual cues are important to me. I’m a visual storyteller, and the sooner I can see the story’s shape, the tighter the storytelling itself becomes.
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