I’m in the “putting it all together” phase of my writing preparation. I’ve got the world built. I’ve got my major characters and their relationships to each other figured out. I’ve got the plot outlined, which has led to new characters being created. I’ve got a rough skeleton of possible scenes, with some more developed than others.

The main thing I need to do now is find the “voice” for this book. It’s going to have multiple viewpoints, so I think it will be written in third person, which is unusual for me. I love first person narration, but it just won’t work with this story. So I need to find the narrative voice for each character’s viewpoint. I do that by doing some freewriting exercises, just picking some random event that’s probably not going to end up in the book and writing how that scene might be told from that character’s perspective. I use scenes that won’t end up in the book so that I won’t feel stuck with that scene the way it is. I can play with style until I find what I like and then not have to worry about editing that scene to fit into the final story.

I also need to drill into specifics for the settings that I’m likely to need for the scenes I have planned. What, precisely, does it look like? What colors are there in these rooms, is there carpet on the floors, what does the place smell like, etc. Once I get started writing the story, I don’t think about these things, and I find the details are more likely to find their way in to the book if I’ve planned them in advance and worked them into my mental movie. When I haven’t pictured the settings, the scenes tend to take place in a void in my head, and it’s harder to figure out the details and add them later.

There’s going to be a lot of daydreaming this week because a lot of this comes from just imagining. I’m fine tuning my mental movie.

I’ll be doing more intense development of the first few scenes, too. I had a big breakthrough yesterday with the opening scene when I figured out what was really going on, and that turned the scene on its head and set up something great for later in the story. I love it when things like that happen.