What do you think of Book in a Week?

Many of us have heard of the “Book in a Week” idea where you sit down and pound out the pages for a week or two until you have a finished rough draft. It’s scraggly, it’s ugly, but by golly you now have 300 pages or so of something to work with.

I think that only works if you know what’s going to happen. If you have the storylines all mapped out, the major turning points in mind, you can blast through it. But what if you don’t have a clue where you’re going? I don’t think it would work then. That’s my problem. I’m at the stage where I’m beginning to get a better grasp of pacing, to know that–for a 400 page medieval, I need to have a subplot, and the conflicts have to keep sharpening all the way to the end. But the strangest thing is, the more I write, the more I realize that I don’t need as much plot as I think I do.

Emotional plotting is a whole ‘nother animal. Taking two people who have no reason to love each other and getting them to the point where they can’t live without each other, takes 200 pages in and of itself. My early books had way too much plot. My newer books have less plot and more emotional intensity. But I still feel like I’m not quite there yet.

There’s also pacing of emotions. When I wrote my first book, my hero and heroine were lusting after each other on page 60. Ouch. Now, I’m trying to stretch that out, but in order to make it real, I have to have more emotional conflict. In short, the more I know, the more I realize how LITTLE I know. Sometimes you get it right, out of instinct. Other times, when you try to apply a formula–e.g., they won’t kiss until page 150, it just doesn’t work. I think the key is when you lose the author distance and you can get inside their heads. When you’re not just making up the story, but LIVING the story, that’s when the magic comes.

Then you sit back and think, how in the world did I write that?