How do you admisnister your next book? When I get ideas for my next story, I quickly think up scenes and conversations that I'll love to put in there. I have to plan and structure the storyline of my book otherwise it'll run off track, but often when I write the story seems to take a turn I hadn't planned because the turn simply feels more natural. This often makes the work I put into the skeleton redundant and the scenes and conversations might not really fit anymore. This makes me wonder, how do you plan and structure your book in order to avoid this?
Thanks to everyone. There's a lot of good stuff here :)
David, I wrote my brief guide as an editing and revision tool. It is not perfect. It needs refining. But it has helped me enormously. Having it close-at-hand has helped me get my word count from 137,000 words to 95,000. If I discover more useful tips, I will add them to the appropiate sections, and post a revised edition sometime in the future.
I am pleased that others find some or most of the content useful.
Interesting...
I agree with Margaret's early post and don't agree with the first two paragraphs in Adrian's... I have, however, not just saved Adrian's Guide but printed it off. I might even laminate it!
Personally I very rarely even want to know the end of a story. I have found that, for me, knowing the end is a problem. The difficulty is to not constantly direct everything to an "inevitable" conclusion.
The one exception that I have found to this is where the end is a complete twist in the tail. Even then I have to be careful. The main story needs to have the elements in it that, on reflection, make the twist logical... but they have to be discreet.
I think that I am fortunate though. My writing comes in bursts which often make seperate chuns of a story - then all I have to do is to fit them together...
I am certain that there is no one way but also that we can always pick up useful ideas.
Thanks for the big effort Adrian.
:-) David