Précising the chapters

The perceived literary wisdom is to...’write from experience’. Over the past 25 years that has not always been my experience. Whether writing stand-up material or satirising material for sketches I can recall that this was often a matter of extrapolating or inverting situations and stereotypes to make the comedy work.

This book throws up a couple of problems:
1. A great deal of the novel will come directly from my/our personal experience.
2. As I mentioned in last Friday’s blog I was never enthusiastic and confident about novel-writing, so I’m not sure how I can and will handle writing narrative.
These factors will become evident in the weeks ahead.

For now, I have 5 main (human) characters, I have a location, I have 15 chapter treatments and a nameless dog. This was followed by expanding upon the situations into a plotline for each chapter. This takes the form of staring at blank sheets of A4 along with intense thought whereby images and some dialogue formulate and then play like a film in my mind. Once an image or idea is transfixed and therefore feels right I go over it again and start to write sketchily and very fast – appending each idea or plotpoint with character notes and/or snippets of dialogue.

At this stage I’m fairly amazed, and quite heartened, that so much of the story is coalescing easily and quickly. My little grey cells seem to be in good physical shape.