How do you write?
On Linkedin there are several writers' groups that share ideas regularly. One of the ongoing discussions is about methodology - how writers craft a story, whether they write to a conclusion or let the conclusion flow from the creative aspect. As you can imagine, there are many different styles. Some are notorious outliners, and plan every detail before they begin. Others rely on more fluid process, and let the story "talk to them."
I am definitely a free-writer - thanks to a class I took years ago at Evergreen College from Peter Elbow, one of the country's sage authors and professors of writing. I write in what I call "snippets" - disconnected pieces of stories within a general theme. And the word "general" is used very loosely.
But you cannot write a novel this way. At some point you have to begin the process of assembling all these ideas and fitting them together. This is where I use my "Story Draft." The Story Draft is a spreadsheet that serves as an outline that I make when I have completed about 2/3 of the initial writing - but it is much more than that.
Each of my snippets is numbered by chapter and section, and the spreadsheet lists the number of words in each. In "As Angels Weep" - book 4 of The Juno Letters - I have five parallel stories that follow the lives of three girls who have escaped from Berlin, a Gestapo captain consumed with finding them, and the investigator seeking to locate the girls as women in the present day. Each of these separate stories were included in a single chapter initially and written pretty much from start to finish - by sections. The completed book, however, would be difficult to follow that way. That is where the number comes into play.
My story draft comes together when I take my snippet listings and rearrange them in the logical sections and breaks which become the final chapters. The numbering lets me easily find them in the initial manuscript and allows me to move sections around easily - renumbering as I go. The word numbering allows me to keep the groups of sections balanced so I don't inadvertently skew the narrative one way or another. I also color code certain relevant sub-ideas so I can make summaries of such things as sections primarily dialog, narrative, girl 1 story, back story, etc. I can tell at a glance where I have to make improvements.
When the first story draft is completed, I print the document and do editing manually - often moving sections around. It is very easy to simply make a note - "Insert 10.3 before 12.6" - for example. It also shows me where I need to cut or add narrative to achieve the balance I am after.
I am about halfway through the story draft of "As Angels Weep" and discovered that I have overwritten one girl's story and left out some important parts of the "back story" - the present day narrative. The spreadsheet view shows these anomalies clearly.
