My homemade MFA in creative writing

[darkemeralds]

Happy New Year to the few, the strong, the loyal who are still here at Dreamwidth.

2016, like 2015, has been about my homemade MFA program in creative writing. My "thesis"--which was due on December 31st and should be done this week--is a publishable final draft of Restraint. I expect 2017 to be about writing, too.

My program of study has revolved primarily around story structure and editing. As I approach the finish line, here's a roundup of the changes my studies have wrought:

• Word count: Fanfic 230,000, Profic 145,000.
• Character names changed: 15
• Characters cut: 2
• Subplots cut: also 2
• Subplots added: 1
• Scenes cut: I've lost track. A lot.
• Scenes added: about 10
• Average sentence length: Fanfic 16 words, Profic 14 words
• Reading ease score: Fanfic 69, Profic 72 (higher is easier)
• Number of drafts to get here: 8

Here's a rough and improvised heat map of the restructured novel, scene by scene. Green bars are scenes that end positive; red, negative. Height of bar approximates scene intensity:



Three fellow writers have volunteered to read and comment on the final draft. Assuming they find no major failings, I'll polish it up and start sending it out in March.

In other writing news, I'm taking Shawn Coyne's Story Grid Workshop in New York City in February. It'll be three days with the story structure master and 25 other writers who are ready to go pro. Since Restraint will be finished by then, I'll be applying what I learn there--and everything I've learned in my Homemade MFA Program--to my next novel, which is currently in the proto-outline stage.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

That's a ton of hard work.

(Also, what tech creates that remarkable heat-map?)

[darkemeralds]

Heh. It's just a spreadsheet in Google Drive, with a list of scenes and some blank columns that I fill in by hand, based on my best guesstimate of emotional intensity. Then crop, save as an image, turn it 90 degrees...

I mean, really low tech. :D I did think about coding something that would render the colored bars by valence and intensity based on some numerical value above and below zero, but I felt like that might be carrying obsession and analysis a bit too far!

Still, viewing a novel as a big data set has some merit, as unglamorous and left-brained as that sounds. Early takes on this heat map showed me just where my pacing was off. If an existing graphing tool were out there, I'd definitely find a way to use it!