I Never Claimed to be Virginia Woolf...

I'm in a writing group. 

This has been the case for the past six months. Once a fortnight, I rock up to a Portuguese cafe in town, have a Diet Coke (or wine if I've trained it) and listen to other people read their short stories, poems, or chapters from their current works in progress. And sometimes I read too.

The reading aloud thing is nerve-wracking. I can't lie. It's like being at school. Except instead of indifferent, bored peers who are just waiting for the bell, these are interested, opinionated, fellow writers, whose sole reason for listening is to tell you what isn't working. Yet despite those high stakes, it is enjoyable. It is certainly useful. I'd been looking for something like this for a while, so when I found it, everything felt a little easier. I had people with whom I could talk about writing. People who understood.

The only slight problem is that I joined after I'd completed the vast bulk of Leeza McAuliffe Has Something To Say. I was down to the tinkering and spellchecking stage. So when I read a chapter or an extract, the feedback from peers was happily welcomed, but ultimately ignored. It had to be. I'd already commissioned the front cover, which included the dimensions and spine width. If I added any more pages, or reduced them, the whole thing would have been off. Any tinkering had to maintain the 388 pages that the spine covered. So when someone picked up on a typo, that was fixable. But when someone told me it might be better to include extra detail about what the rest of the class were doing while Leeza was describing the Medieval Banquet that Ms Archer had set up - well, it might have been good advice, but way too late.

Since Leeza McAuliffe has been in her final stages, I've not read anything out. There's been nothing new to share, and it seemed daft to cover old, completed work. It's meant I've been fairly quiet over the meetings. I've missed being as much a part of it. Meanwhile I've been writing up a frenzy in Book Three's planning file, (outlined last week) but am still a while off from paragraphs and pages. But that's when I had a good idea. I could share my planning process.

Book Three at the embryonic stage

Last meeting, when it came time to share, I outlined how I'd been working out the details of the next book. And in the spirit of (over) sharing, I'm going to do the same thing here. Mainly because, despite being with some other novel writers, people seemed interested in what I'd done. There's no one way to plan a novel, and everyone does it differently. That was clear at the meeting. We've all approached our work in our own way. Here's how I've done mine.

Book Three 
Working Title: Tilda Returns

This is a follow-up story to Carry the Beautiful. It follows the lives of three of the characters - Tilda, Bea, and Stewart - and takes place a couple of years after the end of the novel. All three are in different places in their lives (geographically and emotionally!) and individually going through 'something' at the beginning of the book.

The chapter planning sheet

Every chapter of the next story has a completed planning sheet. So far - before I've started to write the thing - there are thirty-five chapters. As I get writing, that'll probably increase as I split some of the unwieldier ones. 

Each chapter document holds the plan to the entire chapter. We see whose perspective the chapter is from. (Everything that happens has to be from one person's view. It can't swap about.) We know where the action takes place and when it happens. The plan means that the key information that the reader learns within the story, can be eked out. 'What do we still not know?' makes building suspense a little easier to judge. And the beat of the chapter? That's just the cliffhanger, or the punch of information that's dangled and then delivered as the chapter ends. It's the reason someone would want to keep turning the page. By planning those moments before writing, I can be assured there'll be some drama and suspense, even if I can't see it when I'm knee-deep within the typing and waffling of it all. (Typing and waffling - otherwise known as writing.)

Apart from all that, I've also got a page of themes I want to weave in. They mostly focus on ageing, legacy, and the meaning of life. You know, standard blah blah blah stuff. And I've got a page of title ideas. So far, there are about thirty possibles jotted down. I've not found The One yet. It isn't there, but I don't need to worry about it for another year or so. Bags of time.

Ah. It's nice to brush off an old ad. 

So while I continue to use the working title of Tilda Returns (it's so not going to be that, don't worry) I'll keep scribbling notes in my file, keep cross referencing chapters with nods to the themes, and keep making sure that when mid-June comes, I can sit down with my plan for chapter one, and type and waffle until it's done. Look, I never claimed to be Virginia Woolf*. I'm not writing highbrow literature to be studied by scholars. I'm content with creating likeably flawed characters that take people away from their own lives for a bit. I want to make readers smile, laugh, and be moved. That's about it. But the fact that I cannot wait to dive in and get started has to be a good sign. Hasn't it?

Have a lovely week, folks.

*This is true. I have never claimed this for a second. I included a Virginia Woolf reference here because she was a female writer I studied back in the day, and I felt she represented the 'highbrow art' end of the spectrum rather than the 'enjoyable beach-read' genre I seem to fit. Despite that, I love the idea of writing as a stream of consciousness. Indeed, this blog often does that without even trying. Amongst the fairly dull stuff I had to read and discuss at Uni, To the Lighthouse was one of the less dull ones. Plus I really liked the film, The Hours. So there. I just didn't want you to think I was slagging off Virginia Woolf. Not on my watch.