March is here and I've put my book aside since January! I had some life stuff that was taking up a lot of bandwidth. I finally feel ready to dive back into my beautiful mess of a first draft.
I'm into my second draft and working on filling out some holes, polishing up scenes and moving things around. I wrote the first draft all in one go, no chapters, no structure to speak of, just exploring the characters and their feelings about each other and about life. It left me with a headache structurally. I felt totally lost when I started my edits in January, and on the advice of a writer friend I watched this video by Mary Carroll Moore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMhLvMJ_r0Y. She explains a W style story structure. It would not kill me to read some craft books, but I'll tackle that another time.
I broke up my draft into rough scenes, just so I could get a better handle on how to organize it. I'm using Moore's structure to make a story board on Trello and I'm now organizing each scene I edit along the W, so I can see what my structure is so far and where it needs to be built up further.
I'm looking forward to making more progress in March! I've been inspired by another writer friend to set concrete goals for myself. I plan to get through one of the 5 points of the W per week. Some of my earlier scenes need extensive rewrites. My big goal is to be ready for a beta reader by April 15. I'll check back and report how I did!
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