by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m giving myself a few days of a creative reboot with these four novels I’m working on. And things are going really, really well with them. I’ve decided to flesh out the second novel in the series and, so far, it’s going really well.
The more I read, the more I come to understand that to construct a good to great novel, you need to change things up. You can’t just have the same old, same old scene structure throughout your story.
You have to think things through with such things, especially, if you’re like me and the scene is the basic building block of your stories. So, I have a number of how-to books I’m reading about scenes. I have to balance my need to have an ebb and flow with how I structure scenes with the need not to grow too elaborate and, by definition, slow.
I’ve given myself a very — very — tight deadline to finish the first drafts of these four novels. I can’t dilly-dally. And, so, I’m trying to do as much reading and thinking as possible before I get back to writing so when I do write, I write as quickly as possible without any need to go back to the beginning and start all over again.
Anyway, I’m very pleased with how things are going. I’m just a little concerned that if I don’t buckle down and actually finish the first draft of these four novels sooner rather than later, it will be a year from now and I will be exactly where I am at the moment.
That a key element of giving myself a few days to creatively reset. I really, really want to wrap the first draft of these four novels up ASAP, like in a few months.
