My Scribbles Explained: Second Edition

Welcome to the second "My Scribbles Explained." This time I'll go into a bit of world building and then how I outlined for Black Morphi.

World building can be a daunting task. For Black Morphi, I had an edge, because it's already taking place on our earth, and I already had a first draft to tear apart and throw in the garbage. (Not really but I wanted to)

You can find a lot of helpful charts online for world building. This is a chart I like to use:

Joking, joking: Here's the real chart

I also really like using the site Notebook.ai. You can create amazing lists with everything from star systems to flora and fauna. 

Anyways, since Black Morphi is set in the far future, I focused mainly on Race, Countries, Politics, and Climate. These were the four things that would mostly impact my story as it is also based 40 years after a huge World War.

In my handy-dandy notebook, I took a page per issue and wrote out some broad details that would be relevant. And like I said in the last post, it really helps to bounce your ideas off of your friends and family.

Now: onto the dreaded outlining! This part is always hard for me cause I struggle to have a middle that gets my beginning to my ending. Luckily, I already had a first draft to go off of. Unluckily for me, that first draft was written over the span of five years. So, needless to say a lot of rewrites and trimming will have to go down. It's almost likes starting brand-spankin new.

For this outline, I gave three basic parts to each chapter (since I will be making this into a comic strip) and started my outline that way. It's a mix of really fleshed out and barely two words. 

I also set up a "map" of sorts for the story. It looked like this:

OPENING

       Chapters 1 - 3

SET UP FOR ENDGAME
       Chapters 4 - 11

ENDGAME

       Chapters 12 - 16

This outline was full of scribbles, sarcastic remarks to myself and about the story.

After I went through that, I drew up a VERY abbreviated version of the outline to keep me on track as a write.

Aaaand that's pretty much all I have to say tonight, please leave a comment or text me with suggestions, questions, or anything.

Good night/morning/afternoon to all!

Emi

New Project: Beginning the Rewriting Process

Hello all!

So, my last post revealed that I would be rewriting one of my first stories into a comic strip (and new novel). This morning I finally had time to work on it. And oh boy, was it harder than I thought.

Because it had been so long since I'd immersed myself in this world, I had to reread the first draft and ughhh. It was rough, let me tell ya. Definitely salvageable, but it was all over the place. *insert face palm here*

I thought I would sort of document my journey in rewriting this book, to give you an insight into my crazy brain and help other writers along.

The first thing I did was get my messy notebook and favorite pen.

Then I turned on my Writing Playlist on Spotify. It's a playlist filled with movie and video game soundtracks, some Pink Floyd, and various other musical artists. This is all music intended to help me drown out the outside world and boost my imagination/productivity levels. Side effects may include taking off the headphones and realizing your back on the material plane, several hours have passed, and you are insanely hungry.

With the environment set up, I went to work. I opened up my first draft, character sheet, and Google - essential for the research.

First I went through and summarized the story - very basic with only the three main characters involved. It was hard to take out a lot of detail, but this is very important for when I create my outline (I went through the outline process in a previous post).

After I wrote the summary, I turned to each important character. I wrote out their abilities (it is a super hero story after all) and their reasons for what they do. Every character needs to have something driving them. Even especially the villain.
Speaking of the villain, I went back and wrote the summary of the story in his point of view. I wrote what he was doing in the background, ect. This is important so that I can get inside their head and make a character believable to my audience. A villain that is "relatable."

I had several pages of character notes after this. I made several changes to the first draft. After I was done I typed it all up and sent it to my sister. As she is the artist, I want her to get a feel for the characters, so our visions for the story will match.

Next that came was the beginning of world building which is my least favorite part of writing.
I actually quite enjoy world building, the only problem is picking which parts should go into the story. It's a fine balance of overwhelming your readers with the facts of the world or giving them nothing to go on.
When I do start world building, I like to go to a couple close friends or family and get their take on it. My father adds a lot to this side especially. He and I could run ideas all day (or night as the case usually was), and with this story in particular he heavily influenced a lot of the world building early on. So, thanks dad!

I've decided to do a new post devoted to more of my world building process as I continue to go through that particular journey with this new rewrite.

Thanks for sticking around this long! Alas, I don't have any new writing pieces for the end, but if you would leave me a comment  (or just message me since I probably know all of you) it would be really encouraging!

Until next time,
Emi