[Sarah]

Hi Toni, feel free to ask away! Sorry to take a flipping age to reply to this, would be great to chat about this and all other things writing. And honestly all of these systems only really amount to is a distraction from the task at hand.    I even totted up all the characters mentioned in the book I’m currently working on to see if there were too many by comparing it to the number of characters in War And Peace. Proportionately it works out to be approximately the same. I’m sure I’ve got better things to do with my time…

[Sarah]

Hands up who’s editing at the moment!

I’m very good at finding ‘ways’ and ‘methods’ and ‘systems’.  In fact I’m better at that than the editing itself – no surprises there.  At the moment I’ve got each scene summarised on an index card (current count is 95 cards) which I’m now indexing into a small ringbinder (Filofax for info).  I also have a Numbers spreadsheet of each chapter broken into scenes (currently 5 pages) with a brief summary of each scene description (which should tally with index cards) and it also has a notional attempt at tracking plots and subplots (still haven’t mastered this and would be so very grateful for some handy hints and tips if anyone has any).

Keeping up so far?

Not only do I have all of the above but I’ve also downloaded a calendar for the timeframe that I’m writing in – quite handy and, some of you might point out, something I should have done when I first started writing this in November.

I’m still messing about with my scene order and have even changed the personality of one of my characters (turned out this was quite helpful).  My word count is currently 85k, with expectations of reaching about 90k, although I anticipate I’ll be losing another 5-10k at some point in the future.

For those who are interested and dabble in apps and so on I rediscovered hiveword.com which offers quite a neat way of organising characters, plot lines and so on in a more visual format.  However, it’s perhaps a bit much for me at this stage.  It’s maybe not so different from Scrivener but marginally easier to use as there aren’t so many bells and whistles.

And for all you research fiends out there have you been using Zotero?  This is a great app (I have it on my Mac and iPhone) which syncs and is easily populated with references from websites and any other material you might access.  The only thing that could improve it (in my very humble opinion) is the ability to scan the ISBN code on a book, but hey, the app’s free, so I’m happy to do it the old fashioned way.

Thanks for reading (if you got this far).  I do rather feel like I’m writing into a vacuum at the moment and my inner teenager is crying out that ‘nobody understands me’, so thought this was the perfect forum to exorcise these writing demons.

Now back to whatever the hell it was I was doing!

[Sarah]

Mostly, yes.

[Sarah]

Hi Burty, I would imagine it’s up to the author and the type of project they’re working on.  I work on a 24 chapter format (historical fiction) for which there are various templates and so on.  There are 27 chapter templates available as well.  I quite like formulaic though as it means I’ve got a rough chance of hitting beats and so on – not for everyone of course. For this I would expect to write approx 80k words.

If you take author Bernard Cornwell (who will probably write to something approaching a formula) his early Last Kingdom books average about 13 chapters, but as the series goes on I think he nearly doubles this – although probably not the word count.

Just as a fun comparison – War and Peace has 350ish chapters and is about 500k words.

[Sarah]

Absolutely I’d say.  There are some great books of this sort of ilk – Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke has footnotes and references all the way through of magic books from the 17th/18th Centuries, Lincoln In the Bardo by George Saunders again uses footnotes to include eyewitness accounts and references from other sources and even Dracula by Stoker and Frankenstein by Shelley use diary entries and newspaper clippings to tell their stories.  I’m sure there are fictionalised biographies out there as well although I’m not sure if I’ve read any, but I quite like this revisionist way of looking at things.

[Sarah]

Hi Toni, I’m currently trawling through a whole bunch of editing so this question has, of course, piqued my interest and is a very welcome distraction.  Unfortunately I’m unable to help you and I’m sure you’ve done all the usual googley/wiki things that I’ve just done, but I did think it interesting that fairy mythology is only particular to Europe apparently.  Good luck with your research!

[Sarah]

Hi Toni, very good question! Sometimes reading the scene/text out loud can help as a starting point.  Always look at what paragraph/chapter/scene comes before and after as well – this is good for making the writing more balanced in terms of what you need to add or take away.  So, for example, if you’re introducing two characters then you need to give them equal airtime (assuming you’re doing fiction).  Of course this is what I would do and people will have different opinions!  There are other things I’ve sort of learned along the way, but DM me if you want.  I’m not an expert by any stretch but I have a sort of interest in this and of course it’s great to chat to other people about these things.

[Sarah]

@Toni – Replied below!

[Sarah]

I enjoy the ‘unreliable narrator’ aspect of writing and having ideas and perspectives challenged, so to have a fictionalised biography it gives the opportunity to play about with a period in history or an alternate world that the character inhabits.

[Author]

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