THE WRITING EVOLUTION
My writing challenge as I progressed my travel stories was to organise the chaos of words and instil order into the haphazard scenes and hip-hop chronology. As I laboured in a totally unsystematic manner on my mad obsession, I forced myself to instil structure, clear characterisation and narrative drive into the stories whiling deliberating keeping a dynamic of randomness with time, personalities and endings in my storytelling. I developed a number of techniques which I arrived at through trial and error. These include formulating a set of Rules and Issues, a rough chronology, a character listing, multiple chapter iterations detailing possible scenes, characters and pieces of prose, and various Roadmaps.
Included on this site are two of these iterations:
Issues and Rules: As I wrote a handful of loosely connected stories, I was conscious of wanting to do it differently. This was a gut feeling. One night I decided to document these Rules and changed and added to them in the next few months. It felt good writing them down and I guess I occasionally referred to them but not much. I kinda knew them instinctively.
Issues and Rules.pdf Roadmap: My Roadmaps were just that. Tangled lines and scattered scenes of a rough book outline. They described basic scene lists of various semi-completed and yet to begin chapters. When I finished a chapter, I returned to the Roadmap and deleted all the scene descriptions of that particular one and typed DONE! These Roadmaps helped me tremendously in ordering my thoughts, instilling backbone into the novel and creating clarity and consistency into the overall endeavour.
Roadmap Iteration.pdf
Whether you use these tehniques in your own struggle is your call. My advice? Do what feels right but be aware that some order and discipline is required in your creative process. Something worthwhile is not a product of a lazy or unclear mind.
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