Well everyone there was another year down. This was the second year that I did this writing experiment. The goal the first year was simply to pick a story idea and every day spend fifteen minutes writing on it to see where I ended up at the end of the year. I came up with a novel that was in severe need of editing and rambled down pathways I hadn’t intended and quite honestly meandered wall off track then jumped ship became something else and then returned.
I learned a lot from that so this year I tried to put what I learned into practice. The changes I made this past year were to start 2022 with a basic outline and to give myself permission to finish the novel early and not feel like I had to finish up the whole year with one novel.
And for the first part of the year I did well. The outline was a very loose one, more a few points in the map generally leading from point a to point b than a road map. And I didn’t take the expected roads between the points. There was some meandering but I had enough points to sort of get me there. I started with five basic ones. Where I was starting and where I wanted it more or less to end with three in the middle. I think two of the three swapped places as I was writing but for this sort of project the five points I wanted to hit in the story was enough of an outline.
It got me to about June.
Then because I was writing a fantasy story and I found it easy to just spill it into a continuation, I just continued. With no further outlining of points and no idea where I would end up. It was very meandering and in places I had to feel my way a bit. But I kept writing and at the end of the year I ended up with 151,020 words all in the same story. Which was sort of the goal. It is by no means a complete novel though. Far from it. The thing is I find when I write like this, I tend to want to get the story down. I hit the highlights and forget the details. I don’t describe people and give only a shadowy description of the place at best. Mostly because I know I have only fifteen minutes and I want to get the story idea down. Then of course there are the mornings when I sit down for my fifteen minutes and start to write and I realize i have given no description at all and feel compelled to give the description so no one is lost (especially me) and so I’ll end up with teo days of just description.
I like the story but truthfully when I break it down I will probably take the pre June part expand it and make it its own book and then I will take the second part and go crazy with the editing pen and come up with a second book. There needs to be a lot of trimming and editing done on both sections but i can see a clear difference between the two.
And so we are going to take the lessons learned this year and add them up and come up with a plan for next year. In 2023 I will be doing this again, but there will be changes. For me, fantasy is too easy to keep spilling into additional stories. Once I have my characters and the set up I can very easily just keep going. I don’t know if the genre lends it self to that or if it is just me. So For this year I am going to take a story idea that is one complete idea and will not spill into a second book. It will be an idea complete in it own self. No sequels, no sagas. I will use the five point outline system since it seemed to work well for the first half of 2022. I will spend as much time as it takes to get the first draft of the story put together, BUT I will also break out a second story using the five points so that if I finish early I can jump to another completely different story and keep going without the rambling aimlessly.
Even if the first story does take all year, the knowledge that i don’t have to stretch it to fill the year will help me as will knowing thee is something waiting in the wings to take center stage when this story is done. I think (hope) this will be a good step forward and will implement the lessons learned in 2022 into 2023. And of course I’m sure 2023 will teach me something as well.
Beyond the curiosity of writing a novel in fifteen minute bites (or at least the very rough draft of one) I really like the opportunity to take story ideas that may languish for a bit until I have time to get back to them and just go ahead and spend just a little bit of time on them to see where they will go. As always the starts of these stories will come from the stockpile of story ideas left by the fifteen minute prompts that have already been done. It seems appropriate to use them and over the course of the year there have been many ideas that I really wanted to see expand and turn into real stories. This gives me the chance to do that. which makes this one of my favorite experiments. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it too and if you are choosing your own prompt to break out and write along with me, hopefully you will learn something about the way you write as well. Tune in bright and early Monday morning as the new 2023 Fifteen Minute Novel writing experiment begins.
Ten til Midnight 