I’ve started planning out the project I’ll be working on for NaNoWriMo. And somehow everything fell into place to make the entire story structure fractal. Since I am shooting for a fairly simple action/adventure pirate story, I read a bit of Michael Moorcock’s advice on how to churn out an action/adventure/fantasy story in a short amount of time. Some of the advice might work for my project, some not as much. Either way, I did take his advice on how to structure the entire novel. Four segments of about 15,000 words each. First segment, introduce the character and get them into trouble. Second segment, pile on a little more trouble. Third, pile on so much that there doesn’t seem to be a way out. Last, have them claw their way up through it all and make it to the end. Simple enough.
However, as a way of getting a bit of practice and getting myself writing a lot of words on a daily basis, two weeks ago I started writing some fan fiction. Something simple, mindless, character driven. Plot didn’t really matter. Just something I could churn out. If you’re really curious, it can be found here. I’m not planning on putting it on this site because I’m not sure I want to deal with any copyright issues on a site where I’m hoping to sell some of my work. But at the time, I’d been watching the Star Wars: Clone Wars series, and I decided to just continue along with the same character during the gap between Episodes III and IV. No real plot, just character driven stuff with occasional plot happening to drive the character’s decisions and actions.
Somehow, I found myself falling into the habit of writing episodically, much like the TV series. Every four chapters seemed to be a single half hour episode. With a similar format. Introduce, pile on trouble, more trouble, finality. So I found that to be a good style that worked for me, allowing me to churn out plot points that way. So I decided to use that format for my novel, only instead of short 1000 to 1600 word chapters, I’d just collate all four into a single chapter.
Moorcock recommended doing six chapters in each 15,000 word section. However, with the style I was going for, four chapters fit that expectation. And, of course, as I sat down today to iron out my outline for the first quarter of the book, I found that I followed the same pattern: Introduction, trouble, more trouble, resolution.
So it appears that my novel’s structure will be fractalized all the way down to the chapters themselves. This, of course, makes me want to start planning for a quadrilogy.
… after November, of course.