On Retreat - Arvon - The Clockhouse - Day 4

I spent a lot of yesterday sitting on the floor of my study, arranging pieces of torn paper. I needed to find half my book. So I wrote down all of my remaining ideas; scribbled in notebooks, typed up in an unnamed file, swimming about in my head. I had three different colours, sizes of square and categories:

-Big ideas
-Chapters
-Tiny things

Then I took the pile, sat on the carpet, surveyed them and sipped my tea. I arranged them into their individual group. Then I started to look for families - chapters which could sit within big ideas, tiny things which could cling onto chapters. Finally I looked for the order I wanted to tell them in; spent a while picking up and placing down, swapping and sliding.

A few didn't fit anywhere, but I felt like I needed to write them, had already attempted a few, and saved them in a file titled, 'Oddities.' What they all have in common, and it took a while for this to register, is they are all flashbacks, from the before of the book. No, they don't work with the body of what I have. No, I didn't plan on creating them. And, yes, I have no idea if I can find them a logical, defensible space, or they will be thrown to the murdered darlings pile.

This is before I energetically swung open the door of my study and annihilated them with a gust:

Today, I'll go in search of Blu-tack and fix the book to the wall. It's not finished. When it is, I'll write it down. For now I like the bizarre and only way it exists.

All the hours eaten up by plotting and charting. I read through twenty chapters and made notes on each in answer to the question, 'What actually happens?' I looked at each character in turn and bullet pointed their journey. I was quickly getting too far away, too zoomed out, and needed to check in and see how they were travelling.

I also took an old chapter, written during the white heat of NaNoWriMo, November 15, and re-worked it. Plot wise, I needed it, but the original execution didn't work at all. I printed it, marked what I like, what made me laugh, what was trying to make me laugh and painfully, heavily, failed to.
Then I sat down and tried to start with that. I realised how much better I knew my characters now, on this second re-telling. I had a deeper understanding of what they'd been through and the inner workings of their minds.

This draft was better, cleaner. And the idea of taking the same approach again seemed less scary - highlight where it sings, mercilessly cull the duff notes, fill in the gaps.

And once more, with feeling.

I also visited the pond with Sheena in my pyjama bottoms (my jeans are still drying from our cross-country adventure). We ate kinder eggs, pointed out weird bugs, debated how much money it would take from the other, to willingly cannonball in.

Later, we ate baked cheesecake and talked about the magic state of childhood.