We’ll Stop Procrastinating Someday
As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1’s first draft is nearly in the can. Or maybe it’s technically the second draft — we’re filling in the holes and smoothing out the inconsistencies, making it presentable for test readers. Very soon we’ll have to set it aside and start working on Book 2 in the series.
Jen wrapped up the lengthy prose outline for Book 2, a process made more complicated than it should have been through procrastination. During our year-long planning of the whole series, we took a ton of notes. We just didn’t organize them very well. Why should we? We planned to jump right in and write the synopses for all four books while the whole thing was fresh in our minds, but then we didn’t. Neither of us can exactly remember why. The upshot is that Jen had to do a lot of digging, and we had to have a lot of conversations where we tried to jog each other’s memories about story details we couldn’t quite remember but didn’t want to lose.
To prevent that from happening again when it’s time for Book 3, we decided to be smart this time and get the whole rest of the series organized and summarized and synopsized before we start writing any of Book 2. Jen’s been working on that while Kent day-jobs, presenting him with a page or two to review after he clocks out. It’s been quite interesting to review these later events now that we’ve gotten to know some of the characters. We’ve written a whole book about them, really gotten inside their skin. Now that they’re fleshed out (or maybe not “fleshed” out, since it’s a ghost story), it makes their actions that much more real, their story arcs that much more fulfilling.
In some cases, though, it makes our planned story beats feel like missteps. Our characters are like real people now, and we’ve noticed a few things that feel, well, out of character. So far they’re fairly minor details, nothing that will break the story. We’ve talked through them and found solutions. But uncovering these hiccups uncovers another reason for us to follow through and get the whole series thoroughly written up — we need to have a firm grip on the whole thing so that we don’t unknowingly steer ourselves into an untenable position.
A writing partner is someone who’ll tame the jungle of your old notes to make a garden of well-laid plans.