Hey, hey, Geekly Gang! Kyra Kyle here with another writing brain dump. We’ve entered the “Ber” Season, months ending with the letters BER, so I’m doubling down on my writing. But I had trouble getting into gear, finding a flow state, discovering my voice, and all that fun stuff. Thankfully, one method got me on track: The Literary Triptych.

Literary triptychs work like art triptychs. Triptychs are the sets of three art pieces that build off one another. The artist tells a story with their set of three paintings. A literary triptych–as I define it–can do a similar thing. Literary triptychs take the same short work (or story) and sends it through different lenses. This could include different points of view characters, but doesn’t need to be. I’ve warped a story through first, second, and third person. Tense can also shake up the status quo. But I will be honest, changing character points of view works extremely well, and it does the most to get a writer unstuck.

At least for me. I got to test drive three different narrators through three hundred word retellings of the same small occurrence. Maintaining a point of view character’s voice through a novel-length work can get daunting. Test driving three different narrators was a godsend. Whichever one sparked my interest the most won the narrator duties. After this brief exercise, I was off to the races.

But literary triptychs have a secondary benefit. I explored my story’s world, got to know all three characters a little better than I did at the start, and found details (about the characters and world) I could weave into a novel-length work. And it didn’t take long for me to finish the triptych. If I get stuck while writing the novel (working title is Gods and Dolls), I may deploy the triptych and see if it will help.

Getting back to my progress on Gods and Dolls, I started at two hundred to two hundred and fifty words per day (the first three days) and upped my production to seven hundred to eight hundred daily words. I want a production level that I can sustain for days, weeks, and even months. If I maintain this level of production, I should complete Gods and Dolls well before Christmas. I did begin this process in the mid-August, so I had a head start.

I also won’t stop myself if I catch fire. If I can reach over a thousand words a day, I’ll ride that wave as long as I can. Who knows? I may complete my first draft before Thanksgiving. That should give me plenty of time to edit my previous novel, and Crooked as a Dogwood has been out to agents for almost two months. One more month, and I’ll submit to another round of agents. Hopefully, I’ll be finished with my second novel as I send Crooked as a Dogwood out to small publishers. And of course, I’ll have the third novel completed before sending out the second novel. Yay!

That’s all I have for this month’s Writing Brain Dump. Let me know how you’re doing with your writing journey. And if you try the literary triptych method to get yourself unstuck in story, leave a message in the comments. Thank you for reading, and wherever you are, I hope you’re having a great day.