I want to take a moment and talk through the process I’m using to write Maega. It began with a premise surrounding what I wanted to do with magic (I’ll do a post with how the lore evolved). After this premise, I thought about protagonists. I decided there’d be two, a male and a female. Each would have their own story that crossed over with the other continuously.
I started with two new documents, labeled Gavin and Luan (my two heroes). Within each of these documents, I wrote a summary of their stories. If the mood struck, I threw in a little dialogue. Primarily however, I was doing the most raw form of “Tell” imaginable. Although Gavin and Luan have definite overlap in their stories, I still listed each independently, gathering thoughts or impressions when they pushed to my fingers.
To do this, I leveraged Scrivener, a purchase I still have no regrets for and love.
This ended up being about 1500-2000 words per character. After the character outlines, I started breaking these into scenes. Scrivener makes this easy with CTRL-SHIFT-K, which splits a document.
This gave me the 50+ scenes that are going to form the framework for my book. Whenever Luan and Gavin had overlap, I merged those scenes. Then I went through and assigned a POV for each scene. The POV could be Gavin, Luan, or “Either.” 
I don’t have all the names of the characters yet, nor the towns or locations, but I have a general framework of what I’m going for with the story.
Next steps:
- Flesh out my characters with backstory and bios and settings with maps and history.
- Take each scene and build a larger summary of each, trying to cover some of the specific details.
- Anywhere during the process, if inspiration seizes me, I’ll explore it, whether that’s making a new scene, changing my plan for a scene, or even a theme for the whole novel. To be safe, I’ll make a snapshot (backup) of the scene before I make changes.
I’ll let you know how those go!
Word Count: 10,504
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