Well, that title sounds like a bunch of gibberish, but I promise that I’ll do my best to make it all make sense. Before I get into exactly what both of those things are, I’ve been working on both of these things a lot throughout the month of December, and will probably continue to do so in January.
First things first, what is backplotting? This is what I call plotting that I do that happens before the novel’s outline starts. Without giving away spoilers, I’ve been working a lot on backplotting for the “Healing x3 Trilogy”, so a lot of that includes plotting the lives of Nora’s boyfriends before they met her. Truthfully, I have a love hate relationship with doing this. On the one hand, I love plotting lore and figuring out a bunch of stuff about my characters and their worlds that no one else will likely see. And, when things seem to line up perfectly, it’s like getting that one silly piece in a puzzle that you’ve been looking for for hours. On the other hand, trying to figure out an accurate timeline as someone who loves adding random things to her novels is not the easiest thing to do. Backplotting inherently takes a lot of mental power, since you’re wanting to detail things that haven’t happened that can’t change what is canon in the novel, and might I point out that none of it is real? Then, if your characters are different ages, you have to figure out their birthdays to figure out how old they are when certain things happen. That is honestly the worst part, since none of the main characters in Healing x3 are the same age.
I’m not just backplotting for that one project, either. I’m not sure if I’ve talked about this or not, but I’ve decided to make notebooks detailing the different journeys my chronic illness girlies go on, as well as figuring out how my characters came to find their queer identity. I have special notebooks for each concept, so I’ve been busy figuring all of that out. The thing is, though, is that I’ve decided to do this about eleven novels in. Because I’m a wee bit neurotic, I wanted to do it in as close to chronological order as possible, so I’ve had a lot of projects to go through and backplot. Typing this out is making me feel a bit crazy, so we’re going to move on.
So, what exactly is a lore tapestry? Basically what it sounds like, but each major plot point is giving an index card with a brief description of what happened and then I tape them all together. I actually did this for a specific part of The Cora Anthology, but those ones were all just taped in a line. When I’ve started doing that with new projects, however, I got really into the idea of being able to drop the stack of index cards and have it unfold into a carpet looking thing, or a tapestry, if you will.
Here’s the thing, though. I’m not doing this to replace my outlines. This is merely just things that happen before (or between) the novels, and then any big plot points. Not every point in the outline will be in the lore tapestry, just the major ones. The outline still exists, and will continue to exist, regardless of whether or not I decide to make a tapestry regarding the project. However, knowing me, every project that I work on for the next couple of months will likely have a tapestry, since I have no self control when it comes to my writing stuff.
I have decided that since there’s a lot of backplotting I need to do, I’m going to be getting caught up on it as much as I can throughout the month of January, so unfortunately, there won’t be many writing updates. I would love to share with all of you what exactly I’m plotting, but there’s a LOT of spoilers in it, so I can’t. But just know that although you won’t be getting a lot of writing updates, things are happening in the background right now. And I can’t wait to share them with y’all down the road.
That's all for now, folks!
-C
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