I’ve been working on my novel and got a book titled Story Engineering written by Larry Brooks. It’s a really good book – a great book, actually! It lays out, in plain English and step-by-step without all the fancy do-it-by-the-seat-of-your-pants stuff, the components of every good story. There are six core competencies that must be met and there is a proper order they must be presented in to make the story flow and be structured correctly. This doesn’t just work for stories, either. It works for memoires, essays, you name it. It doesn’t have to be a novel!
I’ve come up with a title for my novel: Mind Ice. My doctor told me when he assigned me this project that I had to promise him that I wouldn’t try to make it good. It seemed like an odd request until he finished his sentence. “You have to promise me that you won’t try to make this good, because if you try to make it good, you’ll never do it.” That’s very true of me. I have to just go with a task and not worry about how good it is before my perfectionistic tendencies catch up with me. I already find myself doing a bit of editing here and there in my story, and I have only just defined the conflict after doing some character development, and am ready to launch into the 12th of 60 scenes. I have written something like 2900 words so far. I’m a day behind, and will probably get farther behind because I’m doing other things, like reading the book on story engineering alongside writing this novel, but I intend to get my 50,000 words written by midnight on 30 Nov 2018! That’s my mission while I can’t climb. I’m writing about climbing instead. It’ll be a dud novel, but at least I’ll have a first draft, and my psychiatrist says a bad first draft is the best thing you can have because at least you have it down on paper. So, to my novel, I go!
CLIMBING 4 THE REST OF US 