Scaffolding 2 Tick Tock

Someone asked why I chose to set this story in a single day and I had to admit I could not remember exactly, so rather than guess, I went to do research on myself!

There was nothing in my journals about the matter. In the computer files for the first draft, however, I found an incomplete chronology, written on January 10 of 2010, five days after starting the blog in which I wrote the novel, and was reminded that originally the story started the night before when Poppy, brushing her teeth, has the idea that the following day she will, like Boswell, write down every single thing that happens.   

A clue.

As I poked around my files, I found another clue.  In a forward to the first draft that I sent around a couple of years later, I wrote that I had hoped the pressure of writing the novel on a blog would help me to “write a novel in serial form without stopping and going back to ‘fix’.”  Even if I had only one reader I felt that would help me keep going.  Yes!  

You could say that I consciously streamlined the project in ways both practical and emotional, from deciding on the Jane Austen plot, discussed in the previous posting, to choosing, ahead of time, a time frame that would, by being finite, not intimidate me.  Surely I could write about a single day, in installments, and have faith that by the end of it something would have taken shape?  

That was the idea.   As it turned out, it worked!

Next time: Scaffolding 3:  What do I mean by streamlining in emotional ways?