Today I managed to get up early (5.30) and took my cup of tea back to bed with me. Then I went through my notes from my train trip – where I tried to write a list of scenes in my crime novel – and rewrote it, adding in some sense of sequence and brainstorming for scenes and ideas that I had missed. In other words I edited my scene list and tidied it up. THEN I did the thing I thought was going to be an uphill struggle – I wrote a summary of the whole story. Not a scene-list, not a set of plot points, but the whole story. Weirdly, seeing as I’ve published two novels, I don’t think I’ve done this before. Not in the same way. When I took notes on the train I asked myself questions. When I wrote up the story, I answered them. I did all this longhand, in bed, with my up of tea, between 5.30 and 7.15. Actually, because I’d written the scene list in advance, and done the tidied up version, the story summary flowed. I did it from memory, not based on the charts or chapter lists I’d done before. Working from memory helped a lot too because i) it was freeing – it helped me to add things in, think on paper, answer my own questions, link scenes together etc, ii) it meant I didn’t get bogged down in the extra detail or erroneous chapter. I didn’t start with what I’ve actually written (which is what I usually do) – I started with what was in my head, what I like about the story, what I can visualise. Turns out I have a much clearer sense of how it all fits together than I thought I did, and when I tried arranging it into ‘three acts’ the action fitted very well – mostly because I was answering my own questions as I went along.
I spent the rest of day eight working on the first in my series of drama text books, or more specifically, working on the formatting. This is taking much longer than I thought it would (given that the darn thing has already been published) and my hand ached from the keyboard shortcuts by the end of the day. I worked too late into the evening – until about 9ish – and although I wound down with a bath I still couldn’t sleep. Probably because I asked at a local school about running a drama club and the idea scares me a bit!