Warp Factory – synopsis complete

Well after four feverish hours this morning I have officially completed the synopsis on Warp Factory. Eventually I had to shut myself in the living room with my notepad, turn off the television and stared out the window until I finally sorted it all.

The plot is really convoluted. Or to put it another way I convoluted it by having to work out the plot after not having had one for the first half. Sure, I had an inkling of an idea of where I wanted it to all wind up but as usual I failed to work out all the logic that involved Frank getting to that point.

Once I sat down and scratched my head I realised it wouldn’t hold up. Hence the hours put in with my Lamy fountain pen and an A4 notebook. I built the synopsis from scratch, re-imaging some characters, adding flesh to others (the wall street salesmen for instance) and forced both Frank (the protagonist) and the story over some major hurdles in order to get from A to Z in a semblance of order that would primarily make sense to me, and then to the reader.

My synopses (synopsi?) are weird – I move from writing blocks of narrative to single lines of instructions. I also tend to write most of the dialogue during this stage. What this results in is a mish-mash of narrative versus garbled instructions, so in effect they’re half written. The onus is then when I type it up into Scrivener I don’t have to worry about the plot and can instead focus my creativity on my writing. It’s an interesting premiss; bear in mind I normally just sit down and write the damn thing.

This whole plot structure lark is

a) new to me and

b) requires a different set of skills, such as logic, memory etc.

It’s been great fun;-) Estimated word count is about 9,000. Interested to see how close I get to that. What’s next? Well, ‘writing’ the story – as per above – and getting it all mapped out on Scrivener as I write. Looking forward to that bit.