A Day Of Faces (10 page)

When you switch to serialising your work, all those excuses evaporate. You don’t need to have a 100% finished work before you start publishing it. Write a chapter, then publish it. Or if that’s a bit too intimidating, write five chapters then start publishing, so that you have a buffer. The point, though, is that you’re freed from the tyranny of endless editing.

A Day of Faces has a weekly publishing schedule. Every Monday I put a new chapter up, no matter what. That keeps me honest and it keeps me creative. It gives a point to the writing.

The online world is one of bite-sized chunks. People browse the internet and there’s always something else to discover. Serialising keeps your story small and manageable, with people able to consume as much or as little as they want, without demanding too much of their time. 1000 to 3000 words per week seems to be a good target, being enough to have some substance but short enough to be read on the train or bus to work, during the lunch hour or in the evening without occupying too much Netflix time.

You’ll start to develop a cumulative audience. If you release a novel in a singular form, you have once chance to make that launch count. If you turn it into a weekly serial, you have a new promotional opportunity every seven days. Each chapter will bring in some new people, and you’ll gradually gather your readers. They’ll start to get excited about the arrival of a new chapter. Over time, that momentum gives you power.

Another benefit is that you start to receive feedback on your story before it’s even completed. As long as you don’t let this freak you out - it’s still up to you how much you pay attention to criticism - it can lead to a responsive and exciting way to write. Assuming your work is good, it also acts as the perfect motivational tool - when a new chapter receives a bunch of positive comments, it really helps you get on with the next chapter. It’s an encouraging feedback loop, which simply doesn’t exist if you’re writing a novel in isolation.

Serialising A Day of Faces has helped me becomes more productive in 2015 than the previous few years combined. And not just with ADoF - I’ve also written two screenplays, have been blogging on a more-or-less weekly basis and have started creating content for my YouTube channel again. I doubt any of that would have happened if I hadn’t embraced serialisation.

Writing tools

I don’t want to tell you what to use to write, but I will tell you what I use. If you prefer a quill and paper, that’s totally fine. My particular preference is Scrivener, however.

Scrivener is a word processor of uncommon sophistication and practicality. Word processors - Word, Google Docs - are primarily designed for very short form work: letters, small reports, essays, very short stories. For that kind of thing, they’re great.

As soon as you move into anything of a larger or more complex form, you need to switch tool. And for prose fiction (and a bunch of other things) that’s where Scrivener comes in.

Scrivener is a super flexible framework for developing your manuscript, which can then be compiled into all sorts of formats, including PDF, ebook and, yes, Word. Being able to export to multiple formats, perfectly formatted from a single manuscript is an enormous time saver.

It also provides an interface that perfectly suits the structure of a larger writing project. You can split your story into multiple parts and chapters. There are dedicated areas for storing research, character and location notes, front matter and anything else you might want. You can customise the whole thing to suit your own workflow and the project’s requirements.

Rather than having an ever-expanding single Word document of scrolly doom, instead Scrivener organises your work in a way that can be seen at a glance. This becomes invaluable when you get to the editing stage, especially if you’re working on something novel-sized. Rather than an impenetrable wall-o-text, you can easily see the flow and structure of your work. You can drill down as precisely as you want.

On top of that, you need a decent backup and cloud storage system. The former is essential for any kind of work, the latter is useful for writing on the move. If you project is in the cloud, you can grab it from any computer and carry on working. I use Google Drive, but Dropbox is also excellent. These services automatically provide a backup of your work, so even if you forget to manually bury the physical backup in the garden, you’ll still have that online copy.

The only drawback with Scrivener is that it doesn’t have iOS/Android/Chromebook versions, so editing on mobile devices is a non-trivial exercise. So if you write primarily on your tablet, you might need to investigate workarounds or alternatives.

Note-keeping is also a writer’s best friend. Again, you can keep notes however you prefer, but just make sure that you do. I use a combination of a physical notebook and Google Keep. If I think of a cool idea, I will write it down. I have my tablet by my bed at night just in case something pops into my head as I’m drifting off - because I
will
have forgotten it by the morning. Why a tablet? Because I can use it in the dark without waking up my wife - a traditional notebook wouldn’t work.

Planning

This is both a very personal preference and something which is likely to change from project to project. Some writers prefer to be free from all prescriptive plotting, finding their course as they go, while others will spend just as much time detailing their fictional universe and intricate plots as actually writing the prose. Either way is completely fine.

One caution, though: serialising generally means publishing before the entire story is finished. This puts you in quite a different situation to a normal project, where writing without a plan is completely fine because you’ve always got editing, right? When you’re publishing on a regular basis, you don’t have that luxury. As such, it’s very easy to write yourself into a corner and have no easy way out. Equally, it’s easy to fall down a plot hole and only realise once your readers point it out.

In terms of planning and plotting, I tend to fall somewhere in the middle. I work at multiple scales. The top level stuff is mostly thematic, with a couple of
very
broad story points. This gives me a very basic direction for the story - it’s no more detailed than the blurb on the back of a book.

For A Day of Faces I have split the story up by ‘arcs’. This ebook collects Arc 1. Think of them a bit like seasons of a TV show. Each arc has about 12 episodes. When I started writing the story, I had each chapter of Arc 1 planned out, but Arc 2 and onwards were only vague notions. This meant I was secure on a chapter basis, and always knew roughly what was coming up each week in terms of writing challenge.

So the description for Arc 1 ended up being this:

Follow Kay as she gets mixed up with the Anomaly: a guy called Cal who doesn't fit any known pattern, and in fact can switch between any other pattern, and is being hunted by the authorities (who want his power). Break into Aviary, encounter dimension messaging machine. Cal gets dimension hop power. Holt attacks. Ends with Cal changing and jumping away with Kay and Marv.

SEEDS: Cal suspecting reality isn’t right. Professor thinking the world is odd. Kay and Cal catching glimpses of the human (human tries to intervene at the end in order to kill Cal).

And that was about it. Arc 2 was even looser, and actually ended up changing entirely during the writing of Arc 1.

In terms of chapter breakdowns, here’s the first couple of breakdowns I had for Arc 1:

1 Generation: Kay at high school, gentle but fun intro.

2 Survival of the fittest: Kay goes to a club. More insight into the world. Ends with cops busting in.

Very, very brief. I knew the general thrust of the chapter, but the specifics of what happened I let emerge during the actual writing. For contrast, here are the descriptions for the final two episodes of Arc 1:

12 Lineage: Cal and Kay get into the parliament building, high above the city, in an attempt to get to the records held there and find out what’s going on. They find the records about how Cal’s generation was wiped out. The wings want to maintain status quo, and genetic purity. They’re also receiving instructions from a ‘Higher Being’ - some kind of organic creature (actually a dimensional jumping device). Cal inherits the dimension hop ability and starts genoshifting uncontrollably. The wings break into the room just as Cal genoshifts and dimension jumps uncontrollably.

13 Apex Predator: Cal and Kay are discovered and there’s a big fight. All looks lost when Holt appears, takes out the wings and barges in, looking for Cal. At the last minute Cal reappears (holding a plant/rabbit/something, as a test), grabs Kay and Marv, and jumps out again.

There’s more detail in there, because I knew the specific events of those chapters were much more important. What happened in them would dictate Arc 2, and I didn’t want to get myself into any tricky spots. You’ll note that even with these more descriptive outlines, the final chapters were still quite different, in terms of pacing and plot beats.

That flexibility is essential, I think. You need to give your writing room to breathe, and if you control yourself too much through your own plotting and preparation you can deny yourself access to innovative ideas and creative sparks as they happen.

It’s a balance, for sure. Do whatever makes you comfortable as a writer, but don’t feel like you need to know
everything
about your story before you start crafting words.

Buffer or no buffer?

I’ve already touched upon this a little, which is the question of whether to build up a buffer of completed instalments before you start publishing your serial. This was my original plan with A Day of Faces, and I wrote about three chapters before I started publishing.

This revealed numerous things about my habits as a writer.

First up, I had incredibly itchy feet while writing those chapters. Because I knew the plan was to serialise and publish online for free, I hated holding material back. I just wanted to get it out there and start trying to find readers. Having completed chapters sitting on my hard drive felt like a betrayal of the core concept, and more like non-serialised writing. It seemed like I was missing the point.

Secondly, after I wrote those three chapters, I then didn’t write another one until I’d published those three. This no doubt says a lot about my personality and creative drive. Because I knew I had three chapters in the bank, I relaxed and didn’t keep up regular writing. There was no impetus to keep pushing forward, because I had this comfortable buffer. Of course, that buffer soon evaporated and I found myself rushing to get chapters written in time.

This initially worried me but I’ve since come to love it. Every Monday evening I sit down and hammer out the next chapter. I proof it, then upload it to Wattpad and hit the ‘publish’ button. It’s immediate, invigorating and hugely rewarding. By the time I wake up the next morning I’ve usually received a comment, vote or at least some views. It keeps me focused, and energised. I’ve not experienced any writer’s block during A Day of Faces, and I think that’s in large part due to the just-in-time way I’m writing it.

That’s not necessarily the right way to go about it, though. It doesn’t leave much room for being ill, or family/work commitments getting in the way. But, really, 1000-3000 words a week should be entirely doable. If you don’t think you can manage that, then chances are you’re not cut out to be a writer.

Whether you want a buffer or not will also depend on your writing style, and the nature of your first drafts. I tend to edit as I write, continually tweaking what I’ve just written. My day job is as a copywriter, so I’m experienced at proofing my own work (famous last words…). That means that my first drafts are
not bad
. Further editing would always help, but my first drafts still tend to be publishable to some degree.

If your first drafts aren’t really publishable, you should know that
that is completely fine
. In that case, build in a week’s buffer, so that you’re always a week ahead of schedule, giving you a few days to proof, edit and tweak.

Don’t forget, also, that the nature of online publishing means you can go back and edit even a published work at any time. While arranging this ebook collection I’ve spotted a few typos and errors here and there - even one minor but gaping plot error - which I’ve corrected not only in this edition but also in the online version on Wattpad. Nothing is set in stone.

The platform

There’s a bunch of different online publishing platforms. Some of them you can charge for your work. The platform I’ve been using is called Wattpad, and is described as social network for writers and readers. For writers, it provides an easy and free way to publish and reach an audience. For readers, it delivers a huge amount of content in a format that is every bit as convenient as reading on a Kindle.

Wattpad is huge. Don’t underestimate its pull or influence. Do a quick Google and you’ll find out lots of interesting stats about its reach. It’s home to a mixture of talents, from amateurs and beginners to professional authors like Margaret Atwood. Some writers have graduated from Wattpad to traditional publishing, using it as a portfolio and proof of concept. If you approach an agent with evidence that people already love your work, it gives you a decent bargaining position.