I have been effectively taking a break from the hour-a-day writing that I was doing since we were away for ten days in April. It would have been nice if that trip hadn't completely sabotaged the month's writing, but it rather did.

However, I have been doing some novel work this last week, in two areas: research and plotting.

The research has been a continuation of my investigation of orbital mechanics and object visibility in space, while the plotting is looking at each viewpoint character's story in isolation and trying to figure out things like timing.

It has brought me to the nub of the novelling experience: are the character's stories interesting?

I have a multi-viewpoint story. Looking at the novel as a whole I considered that the story as a whole was pretty interesting. But if each individual character's story is not very interesting then I run into a problem, one that goes back to Frodo Baggins in the wilderness of Mordor: good novels get hurt by boring bits.

I've been working with index cards (sometimes using physical props is a good idea) and writing short character and scene descriptions on them then sorting by character. This led me to write down the individual story arcs on cards, and it just makes me wonder about what I can do to make some of the stories more interesting.

But that is the kind of thing that writing is about really, isn't it?

Posted by Dunx at May 3, 2010 06:37 AM