A bit quiet in here - I've been off working on my novels rather than thinking about them.

I now have a mind map of the artifacts in the first book. This is important for me because I made up a lot of things on the fly when doing the first draft, and it is difficult to maintain consistency. I did start a similar project on the novel before using just text, but it was too heavyweight so it never got finished.

I have also finally read and applied corrections to the zeroth draft of the second book in the trilogy. The feeling of the second books is very different from the first, but it is still interesting. A bit wandery in the middle there, but still interesting. I will be starting a mind map of book two at some point.

However, the main task I have now is to make book one more compelling. Working on the book over the last eighteen months or so it has been apparent that it is an interesting concept and good characters, but there is no real core to the story.

Then a week or so ago I went to a writing seminar talking about story telling in novels. It was mainly about the traditional three act structure, but the thing that was most interesting to me was that we talked a lot about how to keep the reader reading and how to involve them in the story. Inevitably, my multi-viewpoint story didn't really fit well into the discussion (I was really surprised to be the only writer working on a multi-viewpoint story - this style is positively pervasive in speculative fiction) but I have some reading recommendations and some ideas.

The main thing is that it was direction at a good time. I have read discussions of the three act structure but rejected it because I was not ready to think about it, and it seemed quite stayed. Now I have a huge pile of unpublishable words I am wondering how to make the characters more involving and the story more intense - it is time to think seriously about the inciting incident, the dramatic reversal, and so on.

At least it is easy to identify the overall antagonist for the trilogy.

Posted by Dunx at June 2, 2009 09:01 AM