#deedlie dee

Right now I'm in what I like to think of as the grinding stage (as in level-grinding where you do a bunch of boring stuff to buff up your character). I have the basic plot points mapped out and some messy partial scenes hacked into chapters, but they need to be filled out and cleaned up before they'll become a coherent whole.

I've found it's most helpful to print out a draft and do it all in one go, working page by page, so I have:

A rough draft (in the purple folder) which is a hodgepodge of scenes from the original draft of SoaD written back in 2014 and ones produced by freewriting in later Nanowrimos, now sorted into chapters and with a handy bullet point list of scenes.

My Plot Wall of Doom which helps me figure out what scenes happen in which order, where I need to add scenes, and keeps everything straight.

A brand-new notebook for all those scenes that I didn't write the first go-round.

Now I’m just working through it scene by scene, page by page, from beginning to end, writing in parts where they're missing, editing/expanding/rewriting existing scenes, making sure the characters are acting consistently and that it all comes together and makes sense.

That involves filling out a lot of in-between stuff that I was too lazy to do on the first pass, too: Scene setting, having the characters move and do things as they talk, putting dialogue in more logical order, weaving in sensory descriptions, digging into the POV character’s mindset. 

Today I'm mostly in the notebook, writing a new scene for Danny so that a scene three chapters down the road makes sense. He needs to interact with a particular character and end up in a particular place (mentally and physically) by the end of it, but otherwise I have no idea what happens here, so I'm feeling my way through it line by line.

I realized somewhere in the middle that I had too much going on (the inner monologue, dialoguing with this character, an action segment, going to a new location) for a single scene, and decided to break it into two. 

That means another card on my plot wall and probably some chapter juggling, but I'll worry about that after I get this scene written out.

So yep, that's all there is to it: Write, edit, write, move things on my plot wall, rinse, repeat. I plan to keep chugging along until I get at least to the four-chapter mark (p. 33 I think.)

After that, I'll alternate between doing the above and typing all those handwritten edits into my digital manuscript. I have to get to here before I’ll start making updates again, for anyone who was wondering.