I was off to a good start, wasn’t I?

Then Easter came and I had five days off with my husband. I used the time to catch up on my real-world assignments, as in the assignments for my university course which I am attempting while also doing a writing course and looking after Little Squiggle.

I managed to completely knock over my uni-assignment and then I worked on my writing course assignment. I was mostly happy with it, although I thought of a few better ways to reword it after I’d posted it. That was a good week – lots of learning about descriptions, scenes and summary. I’m going to post it after this, along with a little explanation of the place I wrote about.

In the grand scheme of the novel however, I haven’t managed to make any progress this week. I have written at least 100 words a day however, just on many other things that needed scribbling out. I am considering, when this writing course is over, to aim for a chapter a fortnight. Thanks to the course I know exactly why I’m getting stuck where I am – it’s because I don’t know my protagonist as well as I should. So I’ll be spending a bit of time with her and some minor characters while I’m on a plane to Brisbane this weekend to really flesh them out. Once I’ve done that I’ll get back to writing .

This brings me to another point which was raised in the course – if you know the characters well enough, you can write organically and not to a script. I think this is one of those stories where I’m better off writing as it comes to me. I have many ideas about things that I want to occur in the book, which I will write about, but I don’t much fancy the idea of a chapter by chapter plan. It’s too limiting. Once I’ve finished, if I can identify any errors, plot-holes, scenes which don’t work, etc, I’ll begin to add or rework the structure a little bit, but the main goal at this point in time is finishing it.

I’m curious to know how other writers work though – do you just let the story flow or do you plan before you write?