Fieldwork: How I Prep For a Workshop

I love a good writing workshop. The deep-dive seminars, the writing exercises, the conversation and feedback with and from other writers interested in similar things…

I’ve got another workshop coming up this May: The Author’s Journey intensive novel/la workshop with Crystal Lake Publishing.¹ It is primarily aimed at genre writers, with the intention of getting you to the finish line on a novel or novella in just three months.

For this workshop, I’m going to work on a medieval horror-fantasy novel I have already started and I’m really excited about. I only have four chapters written, but I’m not entirely satisfied with them. This workshop includes focused help on the first three chapters, so I’m looking forward to the opportunity to get these nailed down so I have strong foundation as I move on to the rest of the novel.

And then, of course, I’m hoping it’ll help me power through the rest of the novel.

I know how I write: I can write quickly, which is to say that I am capable of shutting off the editor brain enough to just put words on the page. The problem is, my “quickly” still usually caps out at 2000 words per day. With a day job, a need for a rest, and a desire to spend time with my nearest and dearest fellow humans, I’m going to need to plan my time carefully in order to get my first draft done. (As Richard Dansky reminded me, the first draft doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be done.)

This is intended as a short blog series as I walk you through my strategies for approaching a workshop, especially an intensive workshop of this kind. As always, your mileage may vary if you try implementing my method yourself, but I hope it provides some direction.

In today’s episode: Setting my big-picture goals; planning the story; sketching and allocating my wordcount; and reflecting on feedback from the first milestone, a one-on-one story planning session with the head of the workshop.

Making the Workshop Productive No Matter What

I set out to make myself some big-picture goals for this workshop. I have participated in many workshops that taught me something new and made me feel energized to get to work. Unfortunately, I’ve also experienced the opposite, so I always find it helpful to sit down with myself and decide what I want for myself independent of the stated goals of the workshop. While overlap is allowed, I try to think about what I can achieve even if I don’t get much out of the feedback or the seminars don’t dig as deep as I was hoping for.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst, that sort of thing.

For this workshop, I certainly want to finish this novel draft if I possibly can, but what if I can’t? What else am I working toward that will stay with me when it is done, and I can achieve even if I don’t quite meet my word count goal? Here’s what I’ve settled on:

Develop strategies for opening chapters.
Improve not just character development but character voice.
Learn to build tension that feels more organic.

Okay, now let’s get to work on the novel itself.

Preparing the Story: You Might Call Me a “Plotter”

I have always kind of resented the plotter/pantser/plantser designations that seem to make one’s approach to planning a story—or perhaps, let’s call it preparing a story—a hard identity rather than a collection of strategies that make writing a story possible. Nevertheless, I am the sort of writer who thrives in a structured environment, especially when it comes to need to go fast. Change will always happen when I’m writing the story, sometimes enough that I need to pause and adjust the trajectory of certain events, but I’m always going to start my prep with a solid outline. Preferably, a chapter-by-chapter outline.

Fortunately for me, I already did a version of this. I originally sketched out this story for a special call for novels that didn’t have to be written yet. Still, since I am unsatisfied with the opening three chapters, each of which introduces one of the three POV characters, I’ve been taking some time to look back over my outline.

So, there are three interlocking elements I’ve been focusing on, or rather, two elements upon which the third acts as a lens: characters and their arcs, the events that happen, and the theme that I want to explore using the first two. The theme is my lens, the thing that I bring to bear whenever I can’t figure out a problem that I am contemplating with one of the other elements.

Since I was having a problem with the first few chapters, the theme was where I started. It’s a novel about a Holy Grail quest gone horribly wrong, but its also a chance for me to dig in to my own thoughts and feelings about faith, in the divine, in other people, in ourselves.

Okay, great. So, each of my characters will have their own relationship with that theme: the excommunicated cynic who nevertheless desperately wants their quest to prove that the divine is real; the undead saint who knows (she thinks) that God is real, but feels that she has utterly failed him; and the woman masquerading as a knight, who trusts no one but herself.

In this context, I reviewed each of the things that happens—the plot part of my plotting—in their three chapters, and I realized I had focused too much on events and not enough on conversations. I think my way forward will be to make them talk to each other more. They are getting to know each other, sizing each other up, deciding what they think and believe about each other, suspicious that the undead saint can’t be what the Church says she is, while certain that their Templar knight is definitely a man. I will certainly need to get the story off the ground, but these characters bear so much tension between them, I think I’ll do best to let them be the ones to bear it up.

I’ll see what Joe says.

Word Count Planning and Calculations

This is the “feasibility” part of my workshop prep, especially because I know two things: 1) I will need and want rest over the course of these three months, and 2) I am going to have messy days where I don’t hit my word count goal, so I’m going to need a cushion. For this task, I’ve started using this fantastic word count, goals, and beats spreadsheet from Rowan Brighton Brown. I’m a sucker for a good spreadsheet, and this one has it all: percentage estimates for story beats, word count projections, a chart to let you see your progress at a glance. I’ve also done some customization on my version (e.g. I use number of words rather than page count), but if you’re looking for a good tracking sheet, I highly recommend this one.

I have started implementing word count tracking because the dark fantasy novel I am currently querying taught me that I cannot be trusted to just write until I feel done. My first draft of that book clocked in at 215,000 words. Yes, you read that right. The current standard for most adult fantasy novels usually CAPS at 100k. So, in order to even stand a chance of finding representation for it, over the course of more than I year I cut ONE. HUNDRED. THOUSAND. WORDS. From my novel. It is now at 115,000 and I do not think I can reasonably cut more without losing parts that are too important to strip away. This book taught me that I do not want to do that again! (However, I do plan to do a blog post on it at some point, because it also taught me great lessons about editing and deciding what is really important.)

Time for some math. Based on my outline, I will have twenty-five chapters. My chapters are typically 2000-2500 words, but some of them might run long. Let’s say 3000 words per chapter, putting the final novel estimate at 75000 words. This is great, as it puts me in the lower preferred end of novel length for adult horror novels. It’s a little bit short for fantasy, but I think that will be okay given the current state of the industry.

Now, we pull out the calendar. The course will run for 92 days. Assuming no days off, I should average 815 words per day. However, I will definitely have some days that are lower and others I plan to spend with family and friends or traveling to Pittsburg for the 10^th annual StokerCon! Let’s estimate 20 total days completely off, meaning my final estimate is an average of 1042 words per day.

I breathe a sigh of relief. That’s not so bad! I had dreaded pushing for 2000 words per day for three months, which is a recipe for brutal burnout.

Finally, I do some word budgeting. Since I have an outline, I’ve sketched out rough milestones based on my novel structure. Some folks like to use Save the Cat, others the Seven Layer Plot. I built my novel basically by corrupting the traditional Hero’s Journey (this is a Grail Quest, after all) with John Clute’s Darkening Garden. By looking at the structure, I can judge that I should be approximately 30% of the way into my book when the characters hit the critical “Crossing the Threshold” point, and based on my total word count estimate, I should hit that point at around 15k words.

This might seem like an endless, frustrating exercise in unnecessary math, but I am giving myself guide rails. Again, I never want to have to cut 100k words from a book ever again. My milestones are not set in stone, and I’ll move as I need to, but setting out markers on the path means I’ll notice if I massively overshoot the wordcount on a particular section.

With that math done, it’s about time for me to have the first meeting with Joe.

Surprising Questions and Character Arc Planning

I might have been pitching my books too much lately, because I went into our one-on-one meeting subconsciously treating it like a marketing meeting—what is my book about and why would someone like it?—and workshop head, mercifully, had his head on straight and treated it as a planning meeting. I had prepped my pitch and comparable titles and inspiration and and and…

The organizer didn’t ask for any of that. Instead, the very first thing he asked was: How does your book end?

What a genius question. I instantly had to shut down my marketing autopilot and think like a writer again.

What are the events of the end of the book, and how are they a culmination of everything that came before? I doubly like this question for making me think about theme and character arcs, and for making me turn around and look back down the barrel of a story I’m used to seeing chronologically forward. From this angle, I can see new shapes and contours in the plans I have made to that point.

In the meeting, when I admitted I was not entirely sure about some aspects of the ending, he asked what answer I wanted to give to the thesis or question my book posed. This is a theme question, and I struggled briefly against the idea that the ending needed to be somehow authentic to how I see the real world operate. But then I remembered, this world is mine and I get to decide that I want my characters’ faith to be rewarded, even if that reward is messy and only creates new problems. I want them to look to the Beyond and find that something waits there. Now I have guidelines as I actually enact my outline.

Then we talked characters—not just wants and fears but what makes them keep going? Since I have three POV characters, one of the best parts of this meeting was chatting about how to make their perspectives feel unique. Aymeri is cynical going on pessimistic, so when I describe the world through which they are moving, he’s going to notice more of its degradation, collapse, and hopelessness in its manifestation as burning houses or mass graves. Hildegard, the mystic and saint, has access to the supernatural and therefore descriptions through her eyes provide a window into the movements of spirits and angels. And finally Florian, who is pretending to be something they’re not, will be most focused on other relationships and the way people relate to them, out of fear that they might discover Florian’s secret.

We talked about quite a bit, but the last thing I want to mention is our conversation about my first three chapters. These are not going to be entirely by formula, but they will sort of organize important first milestones and the information the reader needs.

The first chapter is showing the world that they are moving through, and we can even skip the quest-giving scene (to be reviewed in flashbacks or similar) to start. This chapter is for establishing clearly what kind of book is this? For me, this means showing the devastation of the world as they move through the countryside, and give the reader the first taste of the supernatural to teach them what to expect.

The second chapter can be where I first mention the quest, but is going to really pull in the horror element explicitly as I show that there is something out there that the characters are going to have to contend with.

Then, in chapter three, I give a clear sense of what the quest is, how it could save the world, and why my characters have every reason to distrust it. This is also going to be where the characters see the aftermath of one of the monsters for the first time.

I love coming out of a meeting like this feeling excited and energized. The workshop head gave me some explicit assignments to work through, so I’m gonna roll out now.

I’ve got work to do!