FEBRUARY 11th 2017
I carried out my plan about catching up with the research for my novel after every two chapters, and sure enough it works okay, and it does make me feel better to think that I’m doing that work as I go along, rather than knowing I have it all in front of me in the second draft of the novel. Another idea I’ve instigated, and I think it’s a good one, is to use colour to pick out sentences or moments in the novel that I need to keep track of in case I have to refer back. This is almost too boring to explain, but when one of the characters has certain turns of phrase, I write them in brown, for example, so that I can look back through the work and pick up those phrases so he or she can use them again. The effort is to stop me having to search through the writing. When I’m unsure of something, I type it in red, so that I can go back and deal with it later. Things that need researching are in purple, things in green are notes to myself. I don’t know if other writers do this type of thing, but so far, it’s working really well.
