For those of you who don’t know, this is my current novel. I finished the latest draft a couple of weeks ago but was’t happy with it at all. It did’t end properly and I used another character to narrate us past the boring bits (or at least the I-want-to-finish-this-quickly bits). The end is way too flat and boring now. Have spent some time mind mapping and thinking (see freemind , useful tool) and will start writing this section from scratch. I’ve chopped the old end off and will re-glue it when it fits. Probably in a few weeks’ time.
There’s also several thousand words from the earlier draft I took out that may now fit in the larger scheme. Work!!! Hey ho. I’m going to need to create some kind of catalogue of the parts and where they were used. It’s hard to do this properly because I’d rather just write it.
I tend to work in fits and starts and sometimes the narrative breaks down because I re-introduce an idea later and don’t refer back properly. It will need to flow, which is why I need the catalogue. I wish now I had written the damn thing in some kind of markup language because it would be easier to manipulate than a huge Word document. Not sure I can face exporting it and reformatting everything. Not now, anyway.
I did once have an idea where I would chop it up into its fragments and write a program that put each strand in linear order (with some jumping about) and then intermingled them. Every time you gave it a different seed for the random number generator you’d get a different book, or turn of the linear ordering as well. This has appeal and might work if it’s ever published as an exercise on the web. Not right now though, I need to write or invent 20,000 words and replace the weak ending.
I’m enjoying it, which is the main (and probably only) important thing.