Morning Inspiration

I heard this story on All Things Considered during my drive home yesterday and pulled it up my browser while I banged out a page of my latest manuscript this morning.

"As part of NPR's occasional "First Books" series, first-time author Charles Bock explains that it took a decade to "unpack his head" and write the novel." 

Bock has a line in the piece explaining how the book was bigger than his meager skills were when beginning the book. In order to write it he had to first understand the structure of a "big book" and the depths of character it takes to achieve such a book. There's not a lot of insight in the story about how he did that, but the ideas certainly gave me food for thought.

I'm writing my newest book in a different manner than I did my first. I did a little bit of advance outlining, and what I called story boarding the stake points of the story before I began the act of writing the story. It helped me realize the structure of the book as a whole. There will still be quite a bit of creative improv as I move the characters between the stakes (and whose to say those stakes will be there when they reach the places I put them), but I'm hoping this will help in the revision process. There were so many words on the cutting floor after I revised my first book.