Letting the muse speak

 This week has seen me continuing to write my SF novella.  I found when I wrote the fantasy one back in November that the looser plan I had for the story carried me through the narrative well.

That was the first time I'd written a longer form piece without having worked out a detailed chapter plan for it first.  Instead I'd wanted to experiment with a looser plan based on Syd Field's three act structure for film scripts.  

For novel planning I've long been a fan of a Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey structure, based on Joseph's Campbell's mythology work.  But I felt that, as I was only writing a maximum of 40,000 words, I could afford to start writing with only the bare bones of the story mapped out.  It didn't feel as big a risk.

I worked out that Acts One and Three needed to be roughly 7,500 words long, and Act Two roughly 15,000.  I wasn't sure whether my narrative would fit that structure, and when I started writing the novella I sensed that my original starting point for it would make Act One far too short.  So I lengthened that part of the narrative by having the ship put in at an extra port on her way home, and having the captain taken ill there.

And at that point the muses stepped in.  They told me to add a mysterious aunt to heal the captain and give advice to my main character.  At first she was just going to be the healer who saves the captain's life, but the muse hadn't finished with her - or me - yet.  When my main character is disinherited and has to find her own ship the aunt returns with suggestions for lucrative cargoes to sell which women want to buy.

None of that was planned in advance, the ideas popped up in my head as I wrote.  I wrote that novella within a month, and when I came to edit it I didn't need to do any structural changes.  My acts and plot points turned out to fall at exactly the right word counts in the narrative.

I've always wanted the security of knowing what every major action was for a novel before I started to write, but I found that I instinctively knew where the acts and plot points sat in the novella.  It turns out I have an instinctive feel for the length and shape of a piece.

So I decided to use the same loose structure for the novella I'm now writing.  Again, it didn't work out perfectly first time.  When I started writing I realised that what I thought was going to be Act Three was in fact the second half of Act Two.

Today the muses have gifted me a big set-piece conflict, and the action which will comprise my new Act Three.  I'm at 21,000 words now, and I instinctively know this will take me up to around the 35,000 words I need.  That's a perfect length for a novella.

The muse has also gifted me with an enormous amount of internal dialogue for my main character, much of it history and backstory I didn't know before I wrote it out.  I'm really enjoying this semi-pantsing style of writing and just letting the muse speak through me.