Well, apparently I'm going to be rather bad at this online journaling. As you can see, it's been almost a month since my last post.
No worries though. At least my time has been spent productively. I've been editing my massive scene outline that I talked about in my previous post. It is almost a hundred pages long and it is a very condensed version of my entire book. The scenes are numbered and average around a paragraph, or maybe two, and they are the most basic, stripped-down description of who is in the scene, where the scene is set, and what is happening.
After putting my outline away for a couple of months, I pulled it back out and gave it a quick read-through, looking mostly for continuity and structure, making little notes along the way. Now I'm combing back over it in depth, making deep cuts and moving scenes around. Concentrating on character development. Filling in the vague parts and gaping plot holes I didn't catch the first time around.
To help myself, I use highlighters to show what kinds of changes are happening in the outline. I even have a handy reference chart for when I forget which color stands for what.
In case it isn't clear in the picture:
Orange = Ideas, or other things (actions, emotions, developments, etc), that are unclear in the story and need work.
Blue = This is solid. I like it. It makes sense. Leave as is.
Pink = Move this scene to another location in the outline.
Yellow = This needs research. Usually this has to do with historical information (fashion, food, transportation, politics, military data, etc) that is used in the novel.
Purple = Someone (or something) needs a name!!!
Green = Notes I've hand written in that need to be applied when I retype my edited draft.
Right now, a lot of my pages look something like this...
Editing my outline is something I think I will thank myself for later. As time consuming as this is, I realize that it would be five times longer to have to do this kind of work on a finished draft that far exceeds a hundred pages. And because it is so condensed, it is easer to see structure, timeline, character arc, and plot developments here than it would be if they were buried in six hundred page draft.
Just kidding. This is not going to be a six hundred page draft.
(Please God, don't let this be a six hundred page draft).
The other thing I've been doing is obsessing over character names.
Sometimes my characters come to me with a name, as if they whispered it to me themselves. Others I only have to know for a short time before they properly introduce themselves to me. But there are some that refuse to tell me who they are. They give me no indication of a name. They are tight lipped and evasive. I will place name tags on them only to have them tear them up and throw them away. And then they look at me like I'm an idiot.
Even after a handful of drafts and a detailed scene outline, I had a handful of characters that still had no names. I could tell you what they looked like and where they came from and where they were going and what they believed in, but I could not tell you their names.
Two of these were main characters. I have never been more frustrated.
I spent weeks on baby naming sites. I searched for names by meaning, trying to find something that aligned with a certain character trait or character arc or their history or their destiny. I made endless lists and pro's and con's and tried out a couple on my writing group just for fun.
I don't know how anyone else goes about finding names for their characters. But I feel like I cannot even write a character, no matter how well I know them otherwise if I don't know what to call them. It's almost as if naming them actually makes them real.
As of right now, I have found names for those two main characters. Woo-hoo! Finally!
Moving on from here, there are still a handful of secondary characters that need to be named and I will also be finishing up with the editing of my outline. Then retyping it so it will be nice and easy to follow.
Then I can move on to that final draft.
(Please God, let it be the final draft)