Tis a Writer's Life for me!

Happy New Year, everyone!  2012 is ripe with promise! (prophesies of Myan doom, not withstanding!)  My dear friends and blog followers, you have become so special to me over the years. I pray that with hard work and prayer, all your resolutions and dreams will come true this year!

This week I began the task of what I call the polishing phase of writing.  I've completed my first draft of Forsaken Dreams (All 65,000 words of it that needs to be 100,000 words! Yikes!)  and now I start way back in Chapter 1 and go through line by line, adding a little spit here, rubbing off a stain there, until it is almost as shiny as I can get it!

For a writer who's a plotter, this may be a foreign concept. Once they've written their book, aside from a read-over, they are done. Not me! This is where the real fun begins. Where the scenes come to life, where the characters really take on individual personalities, where I actually feel the ups and downs and extremes of every emotion. (Anyone got a hanky?) 

Yes, I do cry sometimes at my own writing. I'm that sappy. Then again, I cry at Hallmark commercials too, so what do I know?

This can be the most fun part of writing a novel and it can be the most difficult.  Spread out on my desk as you can see in this picture, I have many things to help me keep track of all the details.  To the right of my monitor, are my character pictures. I have a picture for nearly everyone in the story. This helps me visualize them while I'm writing.  Also on the right, you'll see my stack of Research books all ready for me should I need to look up something I don't remember. In front of them on the desk are very important index cards!!  There is one for each of the main characters (There are 6 in this book)  On each card I list important info such as:

• Hair and eye color
• Physical description
• Quirks such as, walks with a limp or very antisocial, or grinds teeth together when doesn't get his way
• Favorite expressions or sayings:  Fiddle sticks, Oh Bosh! 
• Personality: Are they a free spirit, independent, insecure, fearful, courageous, humorous, depressing, spooky, devoted
• Struggles and problems: Abandonment issues, bitter, angry, don't trust easily..
• Family and other connections

That way, if I forget a detail (And I always do with so many characters), I can just glance at the card!

On the left side of my desk beside my coffee cup are my in-depth character sheets which go into much greater detail and give background for each character and secondary character. 

Then on my computer I have other documents I bring up while I'm writing

• A Chapter by Chapter summary of the story (I usually have about a paragraph for each chapter)  These I already put together when I wrote the first draft.  They also include the date of each scene so I can keep track of where I am in time.
• A To-Remember document which lists things I need to keep track of. Like how long someone was married. What year did their brother die? What battle they fought in. When did his father abandon him?  (I mean who can keep track of all of this for over 20 characters???) 
• An Add-in Document which lists all the ideas I came up with when I was doing dishes, taking a walk, running errands and taking a bath that I want to add into the main story.

Now, I'm ready to go!! I did five chapters this week, which is a good pace for me!  I'm adding things like:

Character descriptions
Emotions
Dialogue tags
Sounds, Smells
Scene descriptions
Polishing up sentences
Filling in historic details I didn't know at the time

Getting rid of things that don't work or don't sound right. It's hard work but I finally see the story and characters coming to life!