I’m working new hours at work. Earlier hours. It’s kind of nice. I get in before any of the major noise starts up. Let me tell you, there’s nothing as fun as trying to write business analyst code in a cubicle farm. There’s a reason why people who have to think for a living need offices—or at least a way they can close themselves off from the rest of the world. At my next job I will have an office.

I did a lot of research for the novel yesterday. I’m not certain where to stop with the research. I really, really like it. I read once that some authors will use children’s books for research. I’m finding that’s just not adequate for this genre. There’s just a lot more to it. A lot of traditions, protocols, and a pretty advanced command structure.

I’ve put a few words to paper, but so far it’s mostly biography information and some notes on plotting. This weekend I’m shooting for at least a synopsis and perhaps a complete outline. The outline will of course be very liquid at this point, but that’s okay. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to write a phase draft of this book. The phase drafts have worked pretty well on the short stories I’ve written, but I haven’t tried it yet for a longer work. The nice thing about a phase draft is that it’s easy to write the novel to. It’s a moment-by-moment focus and that’s usually easier to face than a big blank page.

I normally start by writing a general synopsis of the story that covers all the big, necessary plotting points. There are lots of these, but I tend to use screen writing points as a guide for the main story line. Subplots are a little freer, but they still have the same sort of structure before hand as well. From this I will write out a ten page synopsis. I revise and rethink the synopsis until I’m generally happy with it. From this I will break the synopsis down into scenes. I’ll play with the scenes until I have what I believe is a pretty good representation of the story. I’ll go through the cards and try to visualize the story as though it were a movie. Once I’m happy with that, I write my phase drafts for each scene.

You pretty much write a scene draft told in present tense in an extremely omniscient point of view. You’re writing for story, so descriptions are minimal, prose is simple, and you avoid actual dialog. It’s a lot like writing a treatment. You want to make sure you capture the surprises and all of the necessary emotional arcs. While writing the phase portions of the draft you want to make sure you’re writing in moment-by-moment chunks. For me this is very important. Once this is done, you now have a phase draft to write from.

Writing from a phase draft is usually pretty easy. I normally go through the phase draft a few times and might even let it rest for a few days before I begin actually writing a story to it. I prepare the phase draft by splitting each moment for each scene into its own paragraph. I change the type to italic and then auto number the phases. I write my actual prose for the novel under the phases. This allows me to take my time and really consider every moment of the story. I even have a set of moment revision notes that I keep with me to go over after each section. This probably sounds really slow to most people, and to a certain extent it is, but it’s what works well for me.

Wow, okay, I hadn’t actually planned to write about my writing method, but there it is for the most part.

Where I learned about the phase draft.

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