Now that I had my outline done and secured my domain names, I decided to do two things at once. First, I started writing my prologue and first five chapters that made up book one (the novel is divided into four books). Since I had spent the most time thinking about these chapters, they were fairly easy to write. The biggest challenge I had was making sure that they flowed well as I bounced between modern day and the 1940s. The information on strip mining was easy enough to find via Google and I had driven enough through West Virginia to have an idea of how Beaver Hollow would look. Writing for Fritz von Ehrlichmann came easy enough as did Okahara and the gaming industry (as I have been making casino games for some time.) But understanding how Captain Roberts would get to Italy required more extensive research. I spent a good amount of time with a few friends who served in the Army (in Korea) and got a much better understanding of how these parachute regiments worked. In general research was a lot more enjoyable than I thought.
It took me a few weeks to write these first chapters (nights and weekends of course) and I didn't spend a lot of time making it perfect. I just wrote as quickly as it came into my head, knowing I would come back later and edit (boy, did I edit!)
Second, I continued to add more detail to the other chapters in the book. Sometimes it was just a sentence or two and sometimes entire paragraphs or pages. BTW, I also jotted down questions that needed to be answered in each chapters - especially ones where I felt a hole in the plot did/could appear.
Once I had the first draft of the chapters, I decided to find an editor. I'll discuss why I did this so early in the process in the next post :)
No comments:
Post a Comment