First Draft Complete

I'm officially declaring the first draft of my dissertation prose complete. Five fairly long chapters and 15433 (according to Scrivener) words later and I'm relaxing a little. Tomorrow I can start editing.

The plan is...

• Break up the chapters and use Scrivener to label scenes as "main plot", "sub-plot" (by character name), "action" and "exposition".
• Use Scrivener's outliner tool to examine the balance of the above labels.
• Print them all out and give them a read through.
• Let that sink in.
• Use the patented 'Graham Joyce Process' (narrative, character, setting, int/ext balance and sentence level edit) to fine tune the prose.
• While doing all this make notes for my commentary.
• Write up the commentary.
• Cry while editing and improving all of the above.
• Get the thing bound and handed in.
• Have nervous breakdown while waiting for marks.
• Graduate.
• Keel over.
• Spend the next month doing everything I've not been able to do (because I've been feeling so guilty about not putting enough effort into the MA).

That should about cover it.

Onward!

Dissertation Update

Okay so it's been a few weeks since lectures ended. With them went the best part of the course, the fiction workshops. For a week or so I floundered a bit and felt lacking in direction. Then I realised the obvious: The only person who is going to motivate me is me. Charlotte, family and friends can nag and that's awesome... but it only goes so far. Anyway. I made myself this...

I'm sitting at 9k words, which represents three chapters of the novel. By the end of this week I need to have written another 3k. The complete dissertation will be 15k prose and 5k commentary.

I have to admit to liking the schedule. It gives me the structure I need to guilt myself, should I fail to meet my target word counts. I also highly recommend a desktop countdown telling you exactly how many days are left until the deadline!

So how's it going? Quite well I think. I've got the plot outlined (a bullet-point document of many levels) and I'm still really enjoying the story. The next part is going to be really fun to write and I've been looking forward to it for quite a while. The last couple of weeks have seen a few logic kinks ironed out and a shift in the themes of the story away from abstract ideas and more towards something people can relate to. One of my course-mates put me in touch with her nephew (who sits right in the middle of my target age-range) and he gave me some great feedback too.

We've also organised our own workshops to continue where the official ones left off. It's great to have a group of knowledgable and talented people to review your work and bring you down when you need it

ONWARD!