A decision a minute

 This week saw the start of National Novel Writing Month.  I don't take part officially, but I usually find myself starting a new piece of work at the beginning of that month.

This year I've decided to write a novella during November.  I'm aiming for 30,000 words, with flexibility to go up to 40,000 as the upper limit.

A few weeks ago I was reading Syd Field's Screenplay and The Screenwriter's Handbook, and at the same time I was preparing my novella outline.  For novels I always plan extensively, for this novella I only wanted an outline of the main story.  So three act structure seemed the perfect place to start.

One reason for less planning was because of the shorter length of the piece.  It will be about the third of a length of a novel, so I felt I could get away with a looser plan.  The second reason was because I want to write the novella in a single viewpoint.

My novels are usually multi-viewpoint, with up to five viewpoint characters.  They pass the storyline between them like relay runners hand over the baton.  Because there's a fair degree of  complexity working this way, I prefer to work out all the mechanics of the changes in a chapter plan before I start to write.

I didn't have that for the novella.  The reader was going to follow the actions of one character as she sailed around her world.  So I made my novella outline, and realised it mapped perfectly onto Syd Field's three-act structure with plot points.  The lengths of the sections were even right too.  And I had done all that instinctively when I wrote the outline down.  So, reassured that the novella was going to work, I sat down to write.

I soon found that I was getting bogged down in making decisions.  What were the characters called?  I'd only named the main three before I started writing.  Where did my characters live?  What was their social standing?  What were their beliefs and values?  As I wrote, I was making a decision a minute.

And then there was the essential research which slowed me down.  I stupidly decided my dwarves would be sailing a square-rigger, and I had no idea how they were sailed.  Cue an awful lot of research, which then dictated decisions on some of the narrative.

And even when my characters were on land the decisions continued.  What do the towns they visit look like?  What are the buildings made of?  Cue more research for the tropical-climate islands they visit.  The solid stone of northern climes had to be jettisoned for tropical hardwood frame houses, with high ceilings and big windows for airflow.  The buildings needed large roof overhangs on their southern sides, to shade them from the starlight.  Some of this I already knew, but my research brought me more information.

I have started writing the story.  In fact, I've written 5,000 words in three days.  But I'm still making a decision a minute, and I suspect I'll be doing so throughout the manuscript,