You don't need the whole world before you write. Start with eight cards:
the person the book follows, the person who wants something from her, the
place the book keeps returning to, the wider place around it, the object
that carries the secret, the group with power, the first real turn of the
plot, and one rule of the world. Add the rest as the draft asks for it.
Here is that first Canvas for an invented novel, The Weighing House.
It is 1911 in Hollin Staithe, a market town on the edge of the fens. Nell
Orrin keeps the town's public scales after her father's stroke. The Drainage
Board wants to cut a new channel through Wash Fen, the common land where the
poorest families dig peat and set eel traps. And for years, someone has been
weighing the commoners' loads short.
Character
Nell Orrin. Twenty. Has kept the scales since her
father's stroke in March. Reads a beam to the quarter ounce. Wants the
Weighing House to stay in the family. Afraid of what the old ledgers
say. Says "near enough" when she means the opposite.
Character
Edwin Vasey. Drainage Board commissioner, fifty-two.
Sincere about drainage: his younger brother died of the ague at
six. Buys Wash Fen grazing rights one family at a time. Never raises
his voice. Writes everything down.
Location
The Weighing House. One brick room on the staithe. The
beam scale hangs from an oak crossbar; the ledgers live in a press by the
stove. Smells of tar and wet sacking. The door sticks in damp weather,
and everyone in town knows the shoulder-shove.
Location
Wash Fen. Common fen east of the town. Peat cuttings,
eel traps, a drove road along the bank. Floods most winters. If the
Board's cut goes through, it will be dry farmland within five years.
Item
The short half-hundredweight. A brass weight stamped
with the crown. Four ounces light: the base has been filed and polished
over. Used on every load the Board's clerk brings in.
Faction
The Drainage Board. Three commissioners, an engineer
from Lincoln and a clerk, Mr Pryor, who smiles too early. Holds the key
to the sluice at Denny's Gote.
Plot
Nell finds the weight is light. Testing it against the
ironmonger's sealed pound weights, she finds it four ounces short, and
the oldest entries for the Board's loads are in her father's hand.
Note
The town bell. One stroke for market. Two for the sluice
at Denny's Gote opening. Three for a death. Nobody rings two by accident.
Then link them. Edwin Vasey is part of the Drainage Board.
The short half-hundredweight is part of the Weighing House
and causes Nell's discovery. Wash Fen is
related to the town bell. By the end of Part One, Nell
opposes the Board. Eight cards and a handful of links give
Feldar's suggestions something real to work from: two strokes of the bell
mean water on the fen, Pryor is the one who brings the loads, and Nell never
says "near enough" and means it.
The same novel's seventh chapter is planned scene by scene on
the Scenes page.