My Experience Writing Cora

 I’ve hinted at the fact that writing the novel “Cora” was a unique experience for me, and I thought I would go into more detail about what I mean by that. 

    The biggest difference in writing this novel compared to the other ones that I’ve written is that I wasn’t the only one giving ideas for it. One of my friends at the time was telling me about how they had all of these ideas for a story, but lacked the ability to write it themselves. So, like the good person I am, I offered to write a story for them with their ideas. Originally, it was going to be a short story, but then I liked the idea of writing in both of the main characters' perspectives, so it was going to be a novella, and then it spiralled into a full length novel. 

    Now, I actually didn’t pick out Cora’s name. At the time of the plotting of this novel, I had a list of names that I liked, and if I’m remembering correctly, it was Cora, Catherine, Valerie, and Selena, all of which I would later use. However, I got my friend to pick from this list, and they picked Cora. My friend chose Jack, I got Selena from that list, and I think I picked Tai. He had a different name in the beginning, but it was too similar to Jack, so we changed it. I'm adding this the day I'm posting this, because trying to remember what that character's name was has been bothering me for weeks. It was Joey! But it got too confusing, hence the switch to Tai.

    So, after the character names were chosen, I dove into plotting, and this project actually changed the way that I plot my novels, because I went deeper into the characters than I had in the past. I was coming up with lists of questions to ask my friend, and taking those answers to try to plot the novel, most of which was done the same way I had been doing my outlines. 

    Something that really changed with my novel was the introduction of two new outlines: the Scene Outline and the Chapter Outline. I talked about these in a post detailing my writing process, but basically, the Scene Outline which is where I take every scene from the outline, give it a name, and then briefly describe it for myself. The Chapter Outline is where I take those scenes, put them into chapters, and title them, so there’s less thinking when I go to write. I actually can’t remember why I started doing this, but it stuck. 

    Now, something you should know about me. During the fall of 2021, I got really into my writing, and it started with NaNoWriMo (there’s a post talking about this from the early days of my blog, and there will be another one in November when I attempt it again). I mean that I was writing thousands of words a day, and I loved it. During that November, I was writing “Cora” and a project from NaNo that I’ll never release, and all I wanted to do was write “Cora”, and I think that’s why the other novel just wasn’t where I needed it to be, because I was so passionate about writing a different novel. 

And then 2022 rolled around, and I was still brutally obsessed with my writing. However, my relationship with the person consulting on it had gone downhill at this point, so I finished the novel by myself and did the editing, and then finally released it. However, I have no self control, and ended up really diving into the sequel. Here we are, nearly three years after I started “Cora”, and there’s two sequels to that novel and one prequel. 

    Now, as for having someone consulting on a novel…I don’t think I would do it again, except for with a few select people. If I ever do it again, I am absolutely not making them the main character and writing about their perfect partner, because that got all kinds of weird for me. I did love seeing how another person would describe characters and events, but I’m very neurotic when it comes to plotting my novels, so I wanted to do them in a certain way, and it was a lot to expect of a person that was unfamiliar with that. I don’t regret it, because that was a really special experience for me, but I wouldn’t do it again, especially with the love interest stuff. 

    So, not only was “Cora” a new experience in terms of me not writing it alone, but it also permanently altered the way I write novels. I love that novel with all of my heart, and I hope that it shows. 

That's all for now, folks!

-C