by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
I have a very harsh self-editor in my mind. As such, I find myself wading into a thicket of how to manage the universe I’ve created. I generally know everything off the top of my head, but as the first draft begins to shape up it’s beginning to grow unwieldy.
Between the first and second drafts I’m going to do a lot of the nuts-and-bolts of writing a novel that to date I’ve not done. I’m going to do character studies and write a canon. But I think I may have accidentally learned a trick about the actual process of writing a novel — don’t write the novel as one huge document, but rather split it up into chapters. Then you can better manage what might be found within each of those chapters as necessary.
I’m a little reluctant to do this without also saving the chapters into one document as I go along. Seems potentially messy and unnecessarily slow. But I think some form of this idea will work for the second draft.
Things — do date — continue to speed along with the first draft. I’m going to be able to fill an entire notebook in longhand notes in preparation for the second draft, though.
This whole thing is so much bigger and more complex than I ever imagined going into this. And I’m still not a Gillian Flynn-level writer. But, if nothing else, I won’t be embarrassed — for once — by the final product.
