Saturday, April 7, 2018

World Building

It is less than three weeks until the art show that I will be participating in. The show opens on Friday evening, April 27, with a special event, and it is open to the public all day on Saturday, April 28 and Sunday, April 29. Rob, dear person that he is, has been busy in his workshop building me a modular framework ("hoardings," he calls them) to set up in the 10'x10' booth so that I have somewhere to hang my paintings.

Building the Hoarding
 I have lots to do to get ready. As I mentioned before, over several weeks I have spent hours photographing my works, editing the photos, organizing them, and preparing them for my art website that is under development. I unpacked a couple more moving boxes to find some more of my paintings. (I still haven't found all of them.) But there is soooo much left to do to get ready, and I have not been ticking many items off the to-do list.

So what have I been doing if not getting ready for the art show? Well, skiing. The spring skiing has been fabulous. We have been going skiing a couple of times a week with friends, and last weekend I had a chance to ski with my son and daughter.

Sunny Day at the Ski Hill
 We also did some house stuff. Our new living room furniture finally was delivered. We replaced and upgraded two toilets. We replaced an item damaged in the move. All of this required much moving of furniture, reorganizing, and cleaning. There have been the usual things like car maintenance, doctor's appointment, tax prep, and grocery shopping. As well, I progressed on some academic writing projects, completing two of them recently.

My service group sponsored an Easter Egg Hunt, which I helped with. I hosted and cooked a family dinner for Easter. As well, I have participated in dog walks, attended a community talk, and spent time with my grandsons.













And there's more! Here is some exciting news. A friend and I are part of a new local writing group that has just formed. I recently attended a "meet and greet" organized by the Federation of BC Writers, and the people present at that event decided to organize ourselves into a writers' group. We have had our first official meeting.

I am so excited about writing again that I have resumed working on my novel. I have finished chapter 26 and am starting on chapter 27. I am getting near the end! Of course, once the first draft is done, the revisions begin, and I cannot say that I am looking forward to revisions. 

The other night, I wrote until late at night, finishing chapter 26. As I drifted off to sleep, my head was swirling with ideas and fragments of paragraphs to write in chapter 27. But then I woke up with a problem. (I guess my brain had been working on the novel while I slept.) I realized that my timelines did not line up properly for the plot to unfold the way that I had planned.

You would think that in a novel that takes place decades into the future, timelines would be pretty flexible. However, throughout the book, I have been building a world. And in the logic of this world, I have created the necessity for certain events to unfold a certain way.

There were two main time sequencing issues. Two characters are having babies, a couple of months apart from each other. Somehow, I had miscounted the due date for the first birth by several weeks. I couldn't just change the date easily, because I had already written about the birth and tied it closely to a certain season of the year. I had also miscounted the due date of the second birth, in this case only by about two weeks, but this also was problematic because I am intending for the mother to be doing something during the plot climax that is very physically grueling, and she would not have planned to do it if she had just given birth. Just as in real life, these fictional babies are being born at inconvenient times!

So the next day, instead of steaming along writing chapter 27, I spent hours recalculating the math for the dates of the births and other events. I corrected my timeline notes. Then, I went back and read through several chapters, and made corrections so the timelines would work out.

With this novel, I have kept a number of files of notes, supplementary to the novel. I have a list of characters with details like their age, appearance, relationship with other characters and so on. I have made a timeline of major social and political events in my imaginary world, both preceding and following the period in which my story takes place. I have written notes about the backstory. I have a list of chapter names along with the page of the manuscript on which each chapter starts.

Supplementary Notes
Some of my notes are very messy and scribbled. For example, I have drawn a rough map of the geographical area where my characters live. About two chapters into the writing, I realized that I needed to keep a timeline of the major events in the story, which takes place over the period of a year. I labelled the day on which the story starts as "Day 1." Quite a bit further along in my writing, I realized that seasons were going to be important in this imaginary world, so I went back and re-labelled Day 1, Day 2, etc., with dates, arbitrarily starting the story on November 16. Although I had a rough plot outline when I started this novel, I mostly have invented the story and the details of my story world as I went along.

For those of you who write fiction, how do you keep track of events and their sequence in a piece of writing as long and complicated as a novel? I would be curious to know about your method. I imagine that dates would be especially tricky to manage in historical fiction, and also when writing a memoir or biography. I look forward to your comments. 

And, yes, I am avoiding doing my art by writing instead. Perverse, I know, but at least the creative juices are flowing.

14 comments:

  1. Hi, Jude - With all that you are doing with your art and your writing, how did you ever have time to work (especially the long hours that you did)? :) Congratulations on your upcoming Art Show. I already have the dates in my calendar! Unfortunately, I don't have any suggestions for you in terms of keeping track of dates for fiction writing. But I am highly impressed by the work that you have been doing on your novel. Congratulations!!

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    1. Thanks Donna! The truth is, I had very little time for art and writing when I was still in my career position. The last few years before I retired, I was part of an art class that met Thursday evenings in the Fall, Winter, and Spring. However, I often arrived late or missed it altogether because of work obligations. As for writing, I just didn’t do any, except for my blog (and as you know, I don’t post very frequently).

      Jude

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  2. Congratulations, Jude, on your upcoming Art Show, and the impressive progress on your novel. It's wonderful that you now have time to focus on your passions. Regarding your question of how to keep track of events and characters, I was thinking that it may be helpful to create a spreadsheet with character name, key dates, and key events. You can then sort the data. There will still be manual cross checking but the spreadsheet may help. I haven't tried this out, just a thought.

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    1. Natalie, your suggestion of keeping a spreadsheet is a good one. It certainly would be more efficient than messy notes. Unfortunately I do have a laziness gene that causes me to balk at the idea of setting up such a spreadsheet, and then constantly updating it when my story goes off in strange unplanned directions. Or maybe it is a perfectionistic gene. I know that I could easily get sidetracked into trying to make the spreadsheet complete and perfect, and then not making much progress on the writing itself. But it is a very good idea, and maybe I will do one during the revision stage, when I am trying to look at the structure of the novel as a whole.

      Jude

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  3. In reading all that you are doing, it sounds like you are doing exactly what you want to do - when you want to do it! All will get done as time goes on! You have to take advantage when you can (things like skiing and spending time with the grandkids) and when you are inspired! Sounds like you are living a wonderful retirement!

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    1. Hi Vicki. Yes, I am finding this new stage of life to be full and satisfying. But I am at risk of doing what I said that I would not do — piling on too many commitments.

      Jude

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  4. You sure have a lot going on, Jude! A busy life and all these creative projects. Wow! Congrats on picking up your novel again. It sounds like hard work. For my memoir, I created an outline with chronological events, but I knew I wanted to play around with flashbacks, and both present and past tense in the chapters. At some point, I made a timeline as well with the major events. Unlike you, all my notes are digital, which makes it harder to check on and compare.

    It looks like you are making fabulous progress. And you are so consumed with your approach and ideas that you dream and think about them a lot. Perfect! :-)

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    1. Most of my notes for the novel are in digital files, except for the map which is hand-drawn, the math calculations for dates, and the timeline. I wanted the timeline to go from left to right on the page, and that just seemed hard to do in Word. I agree that the digital files are harder to find things in. I like to lay all the notes out in front of me so I can see them.

      Like yours, my story mostly goes along chronologically, although I do have some flashbacks. I have used the device of storytelling to provide historical background within the narrative, and I have also included some songs, written letters, and quotations from books. One thing that complicates my story is that it is told from two different points of view, so I have to be careful to write the voices of the two main characters differently.

      Writing is hard, and maybe that is why I sometimes avoid starting. But it also is tremendously fun once the words start coming. The revisions will be another matter. I dread that part!

      Jude

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  5. I felt a little dizzy just reading this post! Like Donna asked - where do you find the time, let alone the energy to fit all of this in?!!

    I loved the line "Just as in real life, these fictional babies are being born at inconvenient times!" ... and this is my official excuse for never writing a book. I suck at details 🙂

    Your art show sounds really exciting. I've often wondered what artists do with all the work they create. I have visions of closets and storage space filled with canvases.

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    1. Joanne, I am my own worst enemy — a busy little energizer bunny. My challenge is too not get so busy that I replicate the excessive overwork that I was prone to in my career, and burn out. Is retirement burnout even a thing?

      Yes, you guessed right about the closets full of paintings. I have sold some and I have gifted some, but I still have A LOT. And that is not even counting all the art by other artists that I have collected. The walls of our home are covered with art.

      Jude

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  6. Wowy-zowy, you are busy! It all sounds very exciting and uplifting. I can't attend the art exhibit (darn) but I will enjoy looking at your website and - hopefully one day - reading your book.

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    1. Thanks Janis. It is exciting and fun — a lot more fun than going to the office and sitting in meetings! Someday, I’ll have an art website (it is not progressing very quickly at the moment), and hopefully one day I’ll publish the book (a prospect that seems so intimidating).

      Jude

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  7. I can only say 'ditto' to the other comments when it comes to how busy you are, Jude. It's awesome that you've got the energy for everything you're doing so I wouldn't worry about retirement burnout just yet. You're conscious of the possibility so you'll probably stop yourself before getting to that point.

    Sorry that I don't have any suggestions for managing the chronology of your novel. I'd be doing the same as Liesbet - outlining it, or the same as you - going back and outlining it when you need to fix something :)

    Best wishes for a great art show.

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    1. Well, one good thing is that the ski season now has ended. We went skiing for the last day yesterday, so now I’ll have a bit more time to catch up on everything (like getting ready for the art show).

      Thanks, Karen, for the well wishes.

      Jude

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