Do you know that “Thanks god it’s Monday” feeling, because you can finally do, what you want: your work? Do you know this, when your sleep pattern gets completely screwed up during the week, because you can’t pull yourself away from work until later and later each day and you have to reset your inner clock forcefully by a couple of hours during the weekend? Do you know this “I hate Saturdays” feeling, because you can’t work, but need to run errands, go grocery shopping, book flights and accommodation, do the laundry or paperwork, or simply do some sports for a change? No? But you probably do know this “Just one more chapter” feeling, right? I have this every day, just not in regards to reading, but in regards to writing. And now I know all of what I’ve described above.
Tracing back life in 19th century Sweden! That is what I wanted to write about today. But it’ll stay at the photo above. Instead I want to tell you about the first retrospective and how it changed the way Yoji and I work together in an early stage of the project.
Before, I used to do the research and summarise my results in our common Scrivener file. We had split the work by point of view of the two protagonists, so that Yoji would write the scenes of one and I would write the scenes of the other. I used to write one scene per day, while Yoji could of course not afford the same luxury timewise.
The problems that this work style caused were numerous: While the research was almost done, the concepts were still missing. Based on the research results, how did the room look exactly, which streets would they take and what would they see on their way, which cloths did the characters wear? Another problem was that the protagonists would interact a lot and describing the same person’s actions as two different authors could easily lead to discrepancies. Also, there was this bottleneck that I was already half way through my part of the manuscript, but did not know what happened in between, as Yoji’s scenes were still missing. And as if this was not enough, our writing styles were of course not adjusted to each other either.
The solution we came up during our discussion was the following: We are still phoning once a week for a couple of hours. The next few times we would use to do some general writing exercises unrelated to our book to refine and adjust our respective styles. Afterwards, we would use the one-weekly meetings to each write on a scene and in parallel directly “play out” the interactions between the protagonists by using different Discord channels for the different conversations. We want to aim for one chapter a week, so that we would be done in roughly half a year. We’ll have to see if this is realistic or not. This leaves me, though, with 6 days a week, in which I cannot write on this book. I’ll use them for further research and more importantly deriving concepts from it. Since there is this recommendation of writing each day if you want to become a novelist, I also decided to start working on a completely different book project in the meanwhile.
This new novel will deal with the question of real life vs. online life in times of the pandemics, following the attempts of a young Asian woman to find her dream man through a dating platform, while living in Europe. This book project is perfect to complement the one with Yoji. Since I am familiar with Asian cultures, having lived as a foreigner there for many years, it is easy to put myself into the protagonist’s shoes. Also, this story is playing in our modern world and all kinds of experiences about how to connect to people virtually have been shared between friends and colleagues in the past two years. Hence, I don’t have to do much research for this story, except for maybe a bit of reading about deepfake, and can just write. In fact, within only 3 days, I had already finished the first very rough draft of part I of the story. I’ll do some editing and refinement the next days and then start with part II. Guess I’ll have to find an editor soon.
If you wonder how this should supplement the main project for a full year, if I am already half way through after a week, don’t worry. The valves that had held back my creativity first leaked and then broke. Now streams and streams of new book ideas are flooding me faster than I can write. By now, I am at around 18 book ideas in total.
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