Hi all, I've never sat down and plotted a book before. I have this idea that there's a snow storm and Ashley rushes out to save a dog. Her parents go to save her and her mother ends up getting blown away. Her father blames her for her Mothers' death, and makes this known whenever possible. He goes to jail overnight for hitting a reporter, pushes her away, starts drinking (and almost hits his daughter). It's at that point he starts to realize the dangerous path he's on. But he refuses to seek help. Eventually his daughter runs away from home, and around this time he has a flashback of a conversation with his wife (when she was his girlfriend) and it makes him realize how he's treating his daughter. He also didn't know she'd already left the day before. So now she doesn't want to talk to him, and he's attempting to make contact. Currently I have about 1700 words, can probably get to 3-5k by the time the daughter runs away from home. What do you think? Is this compelling? Do you think it's got enough to be at least a novella? And also, do you have any ideas on how I could expand on it? Thanks!
3-5 K sounds shortish for all of those things to happen, imo. I can see this turning into a novel, but then you need to develop this a little further. Who's the pov character/-s here? The Father? Daughter? Both? What's the moral of the story? How do you want it to end? What would be the intermediate steps to get from her running away from home to the ending you imagine? You don't need to answer here, but think about this some more. It's pointless asking us what would happen, you're the writer and this is something you must figure out. I can offer some questions to ask yourself, but in the end it has to come from you.
Thanks very much, I'll try and add some more details into the beginning part to see if I can outbeat my expectations I was originally going to have sole POV of the father, but then thought it would be better to have both seeing as she is running away. The morale is rebuilding of the family. The father has to climb up from rock bottom to earn back his daughter's love.
