Making Dreams Come True – Part 2

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If you haven't read the previous part, you may want to do so first. See:

·         Making Dreams Come True – Part 1

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I talked to you in the last post about how I finally felt I could achieve my life-time dream of writing a novel because I wasn't alone. God was with me. That's  when I found out I didn't know how to write a novel.

But I didn't give up.

Instead, I took action to solve the problem. I signed up for online writing classes and started reading how-to books. I took my first writing class in February 2004. All in all, over several years, I took courses on writing fiction, introduction to novels, advanced novel writing, which I repeated four times, and writing novel proposals. For the advanced novel classes, I had a wonderful, encouraging instructor, Bonnie Hearn Hill, who had published a number of novels. At the time she was writing thrillers, which were far from Christian fiction, but she is now publishing books for young adults.

Progress was slow.

I could feel that I was making headway, but I still didn't have much time to write. I was rehearsing three times a week with the opera chorus and teaching two days a week. So, I resigned from opera to give me more time to write. My last performance was The Marriage of Figaro on May 2, 2005. It was my 42nd production with Austin Lyric Opera over a period of fifteen years and I loved the stage work. But, I felt it was time to write this book. My wife at the time was also in the opera chorus and she wasn't ready to give it up. So, I drove with her to each rehearsal and then worked on the book while she practiced with the chorus. It actually helped me to do that. I find I write better away from home because I'm not tempted to do something that needs to be done around the house and I'm not tempted to watch a game on TV. This is jumping ahead in my story, but to emphasize what I mean about writing location, I should tell you my first novel was completed sitting alone in the PX while visiting the kids at Patch Barracks in Stuttgart, Germany.

The bookmobile story wasn't a novel after all.

Before long, I learned from my classes, that the story about the bookmobile librarian I had been carrying around in my head for so long wasn't a novel after all. If anything it was a bunch of fictional episodes, or short stories, all with the same main character. There was no story question and no conflict.

With the help of my writing instructor and fellow students, I changed the bookmobile librarian to a supporting role and added a man and woman in their fifties who had been close to getting married thirty years before the story begins.  Although they had been active in church before the break up, afterwards, Brian drops out of church while Karen, moves closer to God. She becomes a Stephen Minister, and then part-time hospital chaplain while helping students and fellow teachers at her elementary school. This wasn't based on any of my experiences. I don't know where the ideas came from, but before long the characters took on lives of their own.

Next time I'll tell you what happened next.

Planning a Subsequent Book In a Series

Where Love Once Lived developed over a long period of time because it was my first novel and, quite honestly, I didn’t know what I was doing. Vengeance Is Mine, may second effort, was much easier because of the experience I had gained with my first book. However, it has mostly new characters. Although there are references to a few others, only Liz, the librarian plays a part in both books. At the time I wrote Vengeance, I noticed a methodology emerging, but I didn’t stop to record it.

All I remember about the method was starting with an Excel worksheet with a row for each scene. I was aiming for a particular market with a maximum of 80,000 words and knew from my first book that a  scene length of 2,000 words was about right. So, I started with 40 scenes. Next, I identified the first ten scenes as Act I, the next 20 as Act II, and the last 10 as Act III. For more information about acts, see Elements of Fiction Writing - Beginnings, Middles & Ends by Nancy Kress.

By the way, the completed manuscript contains 72,334 words divided into 44 scenes.

With Vengeance Is Mine off to the publisher for review it is time to start Do Unto Others. This is the second in the bookmobile series, so I already know the characters. There will probably be a few new ones pop up and some of the ones from Where Love Once Lived will get bigger parts this time. I have a story question developed as well as the gem of an idea for each act. So I can start writing as soon as I organize the scenes.

I teach Microsoft Office at Austin Community College and, while teaching a class on integrating PowerPoint and Word, thought of a new way to get started on this book. Instead of Excel, I’m outlining with PowerPoint. Why? Because PowerPoint slides are so easy to move around using the slide sorter view.

This is similar to the way writers once used 3 x 5 cards for scenes and taped them on the wall as a guide to follow. Perhaps some still do that.

The title of each slide contains the scene number. Then there are bullets for POV, Time, Location, Goal, and Conflict. This is as far as I've gotten in my new method, but I'll continue to share the process with you as I go. Just so you'll know, my plan is to create 40 scenes, sort them as needed, then there is an automated way to convert the slides to a Word outline. Once in Word, I will convert the outline to hidden text to use as a guide for writing the book.

Do you have a method to share?