She works with a three-act structure, and suggests making a chart/table with places to track changes for character, plot, subplot(s), setting, and “other” for each of those three acts (which you can see via the Writer’s Digest website). Instead, you take notes on your Story Tracker worksheet to stay on task while still remembering changes you’ll need to make later” (10). And now that it’s available online and on my phone, it’s become an important and portable tool for me as a place to collect my ideas, notes, research, etc.Īccording to Schmidt: “Working ‘as if’ means that you keep writing-that you keep moving forward with your story-without stopping to rewrite every time you change your mind about a character, plot, or setting detail. So that’s what we’re setting up today.Įver since I bought my laptop in 2009 and saw it for the first time, Microsoft OneNote has been an integral part of my writing process. Something I discovered in writing stories with more characters, more research, and more intricate plotting-like the Ransome Trilogy-is that I have to have a better way of keeping track not just of my revision notes, but my style guide, and my research. Or when I’d make a change in between chapters, I’d make a note at the top of my new chapter to go back from that point and make the change I’d be incorporating from there on out. I had a lot of it just typed in as notes in the computer. Or some other way of organizing my notes and ideas for what needed to change. What I didn’t have back in 2004–2005 when I was doing this was OneNote. And after two years of an endless loop of revisions, I completed the final 2/3 of the manuscript in less than four months. So I wrote down all of the changes I needed to make after the first draft was finished and then went right back to writing as if I’d already made those (massive) changes. After rewriting the first ten chapters three times, I finally had to suck it up and finish the manuscript for grad school. This happened to me when I was writing Stand-In Groom as my master’s thesis. It may sound counter-intuitive, but believe me, this approach does actually work in enabling us SOTP writers to be able to complete manuscripts. You make a note of the change and what parts of the story it will affect (and will thus need to be revised later) and then continue on writing as if you’ve already made the change. In Book in a Month, Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s first tip for finishing a draft in 30 days is to write “as if.” What that means is that as you make changes to your story or characters while writing, you don’t go back through what you’ve already completed and revise/rewrite. Using a combination of flexible weekly schedules, clear instruction, and detailed worksheets, author Victoria Schmidt leads you through a proven 30-day novel-writing system without the intimidation factor.Part of doing a challenge like FirstDraft60 (for writing) or Whole30 (a food plan) is making sure that you’ve done as much preparation ahead of time as possible-so that during the actual challenge period (the 30 days of writing in October), you can focus on writing your story because you’re already organized and ready to go. If you make time to write and put away all of your excuses, could you stay on track and finish your novel in only a month? With a structured plan and a focused goal, yes, you can!
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