Richard Holliday – Author

This post is the first in a series I plan to write discussing how I went about plotting and writing my new fantasy novel Legacy of Iron. I hope you find this insight into my process useful.

Back in May 2024 I wrote about the challenges and triumphs of my attempt to write my new novel Legacy of Iron on a 1990s IBM Wheelwriter electronic typewriter. The experience was a lot of fun and I ended up plunging down the typewriter rabbit hole more than I expected to… but I did not complete the draft. Does this mean the experiment was a failure? In that metric yes; but in other metrics no.

In April I wrote approximately 40,000 words of Legacy of Iron across 70 sheets of typed A4 paper. I calculated this to be in excess of 100,000 characters (letters, punctuation etc). However, I have not completed the draft and I likely won’t complete that iteration of Legacy of Iron.

I realised once I came to the end of April that I had expedited the outlining and plotting of Legacy of Iron for what was really an arbitrary deadline: April is one of the designated months for Camp NaNoWriMo, a sister project to the venerable (and now scandal-mired) National Novel Writing Month concept. I wanted to be able to say I’d participated in my own way – using the Wheelwriter to write my book in a decidedly old-school manner, and I was very pleased with the experience.

However, during those few weeks I was brimming with ideas for Legacy of Iron and I came to the realisation that I’d jumped the gun: in my haste to start writing Legacy of Iron on April 1^st I’d rushed the planning and to go back and reintegrate some of the cool ideas I was having would actually result in much more work.

Frankly, though I was pleased with what I’d accomplished in April… it was simply easier to start over.

I thusly spent the summer doing the most detailed and comprehensive world-building and plotting document I have ever done, and I feel that my story has benefitted immeasurably by me taking the time to let it percolate, explore the ideas I was having and how they could fit together… and I’m glad I have done this. I now have an extensive set of notes for how Legacy of Iron will play out, and a richly detailed world. Honestly, I’m so proud of my worldbuilding document that I’d love to show that to the world… but that is very much an internal document for my purposes, and it’s been proving invaluable as I write the “second take” of Legacy of Iron.

In late August I took a solo trip away to the coast for a few nights and during that trip I started work on Legacy of Iron once again. So far after three months of working on it (largely at weekends and some evenings due to pressures in my day job) I’ve just crossed the first 50,000 word milestone. There’s plenty more to go and perhaps it’s been slow going but my enthusiasm remains high!

In a future post I intend to talk about how the work I spent on the outline has translated to how I’m structuring how I’m writing the first draft.

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