Son-of-Music-Novel Progress Report

Counting the stuff from Wednesday night, we’re almost up to 43,000 words on the new book. We’ve done twenty scenes (one’s not quite finished, but it’s thisclose) which nearly depletes our stub stockpile.

While we don’t like to work on a scene without a stub, that doesn’t mean that we generate all the stubs before we do any of the writing. What we’ve found works far better is a sort of inchworm approach — stub it out up to some milestone, then write all that prose, then generate the next batch of stubs, and so on.

There are definite advantages to doing this. For one thing, even with a thorough outline such as ours, your plans will inevitably be overtaken by events. The outline has to be end-to-end despite the likelihood of needing to redo a lot of it. If we also ran ahead and created all the stubs, then that’d just be more rework. There’s also a purely logistical reason: we find it works best to have one person do all the stubs (that person is Jen), so if she had to generate the whole set before anyone could move on to the next stage, someone would be sitting around for a while (that person would be Kent).

How do you choose the cutoff point for each round of stubs? In this case we based it on a watershed moment in the story — it’s the boundary between acts I & II. You could also divvy things up based on character chronology: Jane as a child, Jane as a teenager, Jane in college, etc. Or just guesstimate word count and chop it into quarters or tenths or whatever you’re comfortable with.

Whatever size “inch” you make your inchworm, remember to take stock each time you start another iteration. Make the stubs your story needs, which might not be the ones prescribed in the outline. Stay flexible and keep moving forward.