The plot thickens

...but it's not gravy yet.

Last time I mentioned The Second Book, I'd arrived at the synopsis expansion stage, or the bit where I have to get really detailed about the whole story arc. Writing time has been very off and on since then, but I finished Stage 6 earlier this week and then discovered that my character definitions were already (almost) as detailed as they needed to be to put a tick beside Stage 7 as well. All I really needed to do was a little more thinking/finessing about the characters' major story goals and how they would change by the end of the novel (those that do), which only took a couple of hours or so.

The description of the Snowflake method mentions that by encouraging you to work a certain way, it can help to force out ideas for sub-plots, character traits and so on that really enrich the story. I've certainly found that working out very well so far, and was quite excited when I spotted a bit where I could shoe-horn in some of the writing I did last year for my 100 Themes Writing Challenge.

So here I am (already!) at the point where I need to create a detailed scene list. War of Nutrition had 96 scenes in total and I'm working with that as a notional (albeit flexible) target. It splits nicely into three sections and allows each scene to be relatively short but still end up with 80-100,000 words. I'd like to be closer to the top end of that word count this time round, although it's not so much of a driver for eBooks as for print. War of Nutrition started off at 100,000 in the first few drafts, but in the end I couldn't deny it needed radical surgery to give the first half the pace it needed, so it ended up closer to 80,000 in the published version.

To be honest this time round there's one part of the plot that I'm still a little woolly about. If you read that 4-page synopsis you would immediately spot the part that turns from very definite "she does that, he does this" into vague statements of intent. A sequence of events with no real explanation of how they start or finish. In that respect, maybe it's a bit of a cop-out to say I've "done" step 6, but I'm going to let myself off that hook and press on with scene definition anyway. I know there'll be no escape for this stage. When I hit that point, about three-quarters through the story, when I don't *really* know what's happening (well, I know the what but not so much the how) I will have to work it out. You can't know how the scene is set up, how it plays out and how it ends without the how. See? Because there are lots of 'hows' in that sentence. So you have to know. And I don't. Not yet. But by the time I come out of the end of steps 8 & 9, I will.