Chapter 17 of New Instruction
The final “Tuesday” chapter is a series of vignettes that follow many of Sam’s boys after school. But the chapter got so long that I decided to split it up in order to better manage its outlining, drafting, and editing.
I’m only one man, after all! Just the Part 1 is already the second-longest chapter I’ve posted for New Instruction.
The chapter follows Sam’s interactions with the boys throughout the first part of his Tuesday night, starting with going home with Bryce and Cody after school. Then he receives the package he ordered with Robby’s credit card, followed by a series of fun videos from Zack and Troy.
By the time I had reached the end of the Tuesday chapters in the first iteration of this story, I was losing steam fast. It was becoming an overwhelming project without the notes, outlines, ideas, or infrastructure to do well. The first couple chapters were mostly spontaneous, results of a rush of motivation and inspiration. To keep the story going, however, I needed more than that.
So the story languished for a bit before I decided to come back to it a year or so later.
Now, I have a whole spreadsheet for what will happen during and before each period in the day, as well as after school. I have documents that listed all the characters I’ve named. I have a school schedule for all the boys so even when I’m writing about Chase in 3rd period, I know Lukas has cooking class at the same time. Will that ever come up? Maybe not! But if it does, I can be consistent about it!
Another benefit of keeping all my notes together is that I can avoid a major motivation killer for me: too much repetition.
Sometimes it feels like I’m writing the same scene with different characters. So in this second iteration, I’ve tried hard to differentiate what the boys are like, what they are turned on by, and how Sam treats them. Troy and Zack’s chapters are very mental. Chase’s are hedonistic. Tyler’s are experimental. Jake and Owen’s are domineering.
While I don’t want to make these characters shallow and one-sided, these guidelines help me from feeling like all my chapters are stale and the same thing over and over.
The ‘After School’ chapters are different from the other chapters because they are just meant to be peeks into the boys’ nights, rather than full explorations of their sex lives, relationships, and psyches. This has made it easier for me, because I can be more okay with the vignettes being only 1000 words, rather than 3000 or 4000.
The more I fret about word counts, the less focus I have on telling a fun story. But that’s just something about me, I always wonder about word counts. So that’s just part of my writing process, is establishing healthy and reasonable word count goals rather than telling myself not to care at all. Because that won’t work.
For the remaining four vignettes in Part 2, I’ve got outlines for the Ben vignette and Robby vignette. I have ideas, but no outlines for the Jake/Owen and Eric/Lukas parts.
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