Mary Kelaher tells a gritty story about life in the cast of a family's shadow.


Mary Kelaher

You're over the first hurdle as a writer and you're finally writing consistently. Now what?

Join me as I trawl my way through all the writing tips, promotion tips and publishing tips to try and find the diamonds in the bedrock.

Girl in a field of grass

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

A writing suitcase

I started packing my writing suitcase today and I have already made my first cull. The storyboard index cards. I don't really need them because I will have the full action / reaction descriptions with me. It was probably a little over kill taking them anyway.

Because I don't have a laptop and will writing in long hand for the next three months, I really needed the room for notebooks. This is why I need to have a first draft of my plot organized before I go. I don't want to come back with books full of jumble of hand written notes and malformed ideas.

That doesn't mean I plan to stick rigidly to my plot if I get a great idea or twist. I think I have reached the stage of writing the story where I need to hone the thesis and tracking the changes I am making. I don’t know how many times at work I have changed an aspect of what I am writing about only to change my mind later on only to discover I have forgotten to keep the previous drafts of the ideas.

I've really got to get moving if I'm going to be ready with my writing by the time I leave. I still have to finish typing up my hand written notes, plot out the whole novel on the action /reaction sheets, capturing what I have about the characters and summarize a reference book.

I should be ok. I can get most of the novel's plot from the brain dump. There are several glaring gaps I need to fill in, but I can do that later or use the freefall workshop in Perth to fill that in if I have to. As long as I have the guts of the book plotted before I go I will be happy.

It's really funny, but one of reasons I chose not to write all these years is because of the amount of work it involves. Particularly, the rewriting and editing. It all looked just too much like hard work. But now, I find the reworking aspect of writing quite liberating. It takes the pressure off getting the story and the writing of the story exact in the first instance. I like that I can just get it down and fix it later if I have to. It makes the process a whole lot more enjoyable.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Sorted

I have finished sorting the content I got from doing the 30 days into rough sections. There is so much. After scanning through it, I think that I have could end up being too much raw content to work with. If there is such a thing.

This task has really driven home the need to know what your theme is and exactly what you are trying to say about it. The task is then to use the best emotions, actions, reactions and characters that will supp0rt your thesis.

The great thing about having too much content is the other ideas it generates for other books. The challenge is to stay focused on this one and file the excess away for next time.

I've just remembered another task to do I forgot about. I have to summarize a book on living in children's home before I leave for Perth (see http://cartentesky.blogspot.com/). It is going to be interesting to see how I write on the road without a laptop. I guess I'll be using up lots of notebooks and a hell of a lot of typing to do when I get back.

Whew this is one hell of a task.

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Grunt work

Well I started sorting my notes into sections and chapters yesterday and it left me with a migraine. What a horrible task. But it has to be done and I'll be spending the next couple of days doing it.

Unfortunately in the short term it is going to get worse as I continue to type up my hand written notes.

The real down side to this task is knowing that most of the work is going to be tossed or reworked in some way. But that's ok. It's all part of the job.

The up side is that by the end of it, I will have the beginnings of the content I need for my action/reaction sheets. And once I finish plotting out version 0.1 of the novel, it will be a lot easier to track where the content goes.