So if you thought you might get something other than ‘I’M SO FAR BEHIND!’ . . . then sorry, this isn’t your week. But I am getting closer to being back on track. I managed to get the edits for my short story ‘Trench’ done, I finished a structural report for a novel with Odyssey (it’s a fantastic novel and didn’t need much, just took me a while to get to writing it), and got stuck into another structural report. So thinks are starting to get back to normal (ish).

What is means is that for the next five weeks, I get to focus mainly in the dissertation, and get to ensure it has the elements to make it (hopefully) more than just a uni assignment.

 

Journal – Week 7

 

Ideally, I wanted to be in revisions by now. Sitting about halfway through the first draft therefore has me a little disappointed, but that said the progress of the last couple of weeks has me almost caught up regard to word count. I think it’s a safe bet to say the first draft will be rougher than most, but John McNally’s chapter on perseverance (2010) is a strong motivator in getting something down.

This week’s focus therefore, has been primarily just to write whatever comes out. I can make it fit the narrative I need it to later, but at the moment I need to write to get the story down.

The second objective has been to get to key beats in the plot. So far the protagonist has simply been running away from each conflict that seems to find them. At some point, they need to engage with the new world in which they are intrinsically tangled and take a proactive role in the outcome. Thankfully, the protagonist is very much a ‘doer’ in the sense used by Jockers and Kirilloff, which gives her a stronger sense of agency and greater ability to be portrayed as a layered, three-dimensional character.

I’ve also decided to bring in extra characters to change the impinge on the protagonist’s simplistic view of the world and challenge some motivations, which will hopefully solve my aim for Week 8 – bring in the cultural world-building.

 

References.

McNally, J, 2010, ‘Perseverance’, in The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist, University of Iowa Press, pp. 13-16, viewed 03 May 2020, https://moodle.cqu.edu.au/pluginfile.php/3244587/mod_resource/content/2/McNally%2C%20John%202010%2C%20Perseverence.j.ctt20mvgmb.7.pdf

 

Jockers, M, &, a Kirilloff, G, 2018. Understanding Gender and Character Agency in the 19th Century Novel, SocArXiv, viewed 02 May 2020,  https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/sw85m/