Title, Theme and Plotting

There’s a little black spot on the sun today
It’s the same old thing as yesterday

So, blurb (just about) cracked and plot ideas coming to me thick and fast, decided I needed a title. Now, I have an idea to start the novel with some lyrics from The Police song King of Pain (album Synchronicity - 1983) so I thought about taking a line from the song as my title. Unfortunately they all seem either too long or complete nonsense when shortened. So, working title at the moment is Black Spot, but it fails dismally to set off any of the Why, What, How? questions a title should. I think I need to define my theme – what does my novel really say?

So how are we going to Plot this novel? I have read, heard and met many authors and none seem to write in the exact same way. Because of the nature of the challenge, I think the best way to write this novel (in a month) is to locate the Starting position, have a Rough Map in my pocket; have some idea of where I am going, and what the Ending should look like…

What a lot of the books and authors do agree on however, is that a Novel should start at a point approaching a crisis. I started to watch a new adaptation of Frankenstein on TV the other night; where the story on the screen started at the moment when the monster is loose and then cuts back to show how the monster got there! That got me gripped for a while, but then the story kind of fell apart.....but they had certainly read the formulae for a Gripping start i.e. Set seeds, introduce characters etc.