Morning everyone I hope you got a good rest over the weekend. This is the week we look at all of those plot gaps and emotional bits that we now know need a little adjustment. For those of you wondering why we didn;t just take the time to fix all of them last week, lets go over the reasoning and a bit of the schedule. Mostly because we have entered a slightly different phase in the writing. When we started and began to take our basic idea into an outline and basic research points it was easy to break it down into concrete tasks. Pick an idea. Name a character, decide your time line… Then we got into the writing where everything became far more personal. We all had our own stories to tell and our own schedule to fit the writing into. Tasks were more or less the general write if it is on your schedule, rest if it isn’t variety.
And now we each, hopefully, have a completed rough draft.
So it is very personal. Each of those manuscripts will have different needs, and each writer has different things to focus on. So the tasks seem more general but that is so you can make them specific to you.
When we write, it is very easy to get caught up in the section we are working on and loose sight of the whole. That was why we spent last week doing the minor fixes and looking at the manuscript as a whole. We also made a list of the bigger issues we knew needed to be adjusted, then took the weekend off. This gave us just a little time to let it sit and let us think about how to deal with our story or plot problems as part of the whole and not as simply part of a scene. This week we are going to concentrate on fixing those problems one by one.
I have about five things I really need to fix (some have a couple of parts for instance I have a plot gap where I move my characters from place A to C without stopping at B. They were going to B and I decided I didn’t want them to, but I need a scene to show why they decided not to go to B when it was an obvious destination. I need to fix the plot but there is also something emotional in there I need to fix as well., which may end up needing to have another area tweaked for flow)
As an example.
I am going to split the five things I need to work on over three days and then do another read through of the whole manuscript to make sure my fixes actually fix the issues in the manuscript as a whole.
You may have three issues that you split out for three days before reading through the whole again. You may have one issue it takes two days to fix. You may have already fixed the small issues you found and have no major plot issues to speak of. If that is the case, gold star for you. Maybe rest for the first few days leaving your manuscript alone before you do another read through to double check.
So that is going to be our week, I will post the Tasks according to my manuscript, but wiggle them around a bit to suit you and your manuscript and schedule.
That being said…
Task 108: The first day of filling plot gaps and repairing major issues of your story begins!
Ten til Midnight 