September 11, 2006
Posted in Writing
Novel spreadsheet
Well, not too, too, novel, since I tried it after reading Justine Larbalestier’s fascinating post on her use of spreadsheets to track important metrics of her ongoing writing process.
Now that I’ve gotten to the end of Knave of Yes (my first novel), and halfway through it again in a second pass, I went through the same exercise:
It was very interesting. I learned a couple of things:
- I have three POV’s, and I had been concerned that I was favoring one of them over the others. It turns out that the three are as balanced, chapter by chapter, as they could be.
- I’d been aware that my chapter length was all over the map, and that turned out to be the case; however, two of the chapters I’d thought were the longest are, in fact, not; I’d also forgotten that one of the key chapters is still somewhat underwritten. I would have gotten to it next, but this really makes it stand out.
- I’d been concerned that I might have too high an ongoing level of action, but my quick, subjective 1-4 *’s metric shows a pretty nice balance.
I don’t think anything I learned was terribly surprising, but I think that this kind of breakdown can only help.
