Writing Plan – Jan 2017

I do realise it would have been better if I’d posted this on the first Friday of January, but better late than never, right? This will become a regular monthly feature along with a Writing Wrap-up on the last Friday of each month. It may not be all that fun to read (sorry, this was a last-minute post!) but it’s very important to me personally because I procrastinate a lot. And by that I mean, A LOT. I don’t follow schedules or plans even though I have a lot of goals I’d like to achieve and it so happens that I can never accomplish them all.

To fix that, I’m trying to discipline my flighty mind by making plans. Nothing too rigid so I’ll feel suffocated or disinclined to follow, but more like an outline. In the immortal words of Captain Barbossa,

So here’s my “plan” for January –

1. Finish Good to Be a Little Bad

This is a fanfiction story based on White Collar, my second favourite TV show of all time. I started this way back in July 2015 (I can’t believe how long ago that was!) for Camp NaNoWriMo, but I stopped at Chapter 19 because I didn’t know how to write a fulfilling climax for it. I haven’t had any brilliant ideas since then, probably because I’ve partially forgotten about it, but I’m committed to end all my unfinished stories and this is the easiest of the lot. I also feel very guilty because a lot of people on FanFiction.net have given such wonderful feedback and I really want to finish it just for the fans.

2. Finish character sketches for Uncut

For those of you who don’t know, Uncut is my NaNoWriMo 2016 novel for which I’ve written around 50k words. The problem is that I’ve decided to change the story in the middle, so I have to rewrite the draft starting from somewhere around 20k. I’m a pantser by nature, so I had a very rough idea going into this project. I realised I need to have an outline and character sketches at least before I begin again so that I have a better idea of what I’m doing during the re-write. I’m only going to be doing these for a total of ten characters (as of now), who I feel are crucial to the story. For my protagonist, I’m going to be using my favourite Sara’s Character Evolution Files series to help me get the character arc right.

3. Plan the short stories for my blog

I usually post a flash fiction piece on the blog, which means that if I’m not free on Friday evenings, I’m going to miss a post. To prevent that from happening, I want to have at least an inkling of the fiction pieces I’m going to post for that particular month. It can be as vague as an idea to even a complete story, but I believe a little knowledge beforehand would go a long way in making these posts regular.

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That completes my list for January. I’m sharing this with you, my readers, because I think that if I declare my intentions publicly, I might be able to force my mind to finish most, if not all, of these tasks, just so I have something to write about in the wrap-up post. I hope you will help me hold myself accountable to the plan. Have a wonderful weekend! 🙂

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