My newest project is a children’s story idea. Suffice to say I will not describe it here; however I do believe there is enough scope in it for a short children’s novel.
I have started writing it using my usual writing software, with a slightly different approach to my other writing projects now that I am more familiar with the tools; however, writing for children is a very new experience for me and I have found that I have much research and practice before I am ready. By which I mean, I will continue to work on the project, but I suspect many structural changes will occur as I write, to ensure that it is a suitable and readable work for my target audience.
Chapter lengths, for example; my tendency has been towards writing chapters that are too short really for an adult novel (in the traditional sense) and have had to work on that as I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge.
As I begin this project, I am finding that my chapters are almost certainly too long at present (actually they definitely are, but so far my one completed chapter can be easily broken into three chapters at break points that I have already built into the story so far); I will need to consider my options: whether to remove detail to make the writing less complex (and the word count for each chapter lower), or find different breakpoints and create more chapters out of the writing so far.
Having now experienced the ‘first draft’ challenge of NaNo, my instinct is to complete the story before making any structural changes so that I can have a better idea of how to break the story down into readable chunks for the reader. However, there is a part of me that – having discovered this problem – now wants to go back and fix it. I like to get things right the first time, even though I can logically understand that this is just a first draft and nobody ‘gets it right the first time’; I suppose it’s more a ‘start as you meant o go on’ thing, whereby if I go and change what I have so far – the organisation not the content – then I will be in a better place to continue.
It is a conundrum I need to puzzle over – and carry out some more research and learning in this field of writing – but I am sure of one thing: I will enjoy finding out, and I will enjoy writing this adventure down.
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