Something I've been mulling for a while is doing something more with some of the content I've posted on Hive. There are several serials I've posted in some of the Worldbuilding and creative writing communities which could be used as the start point for a novel.
So I've started working on it. I have no idea whether it'll go anywhere, because there are a lot of steps and a huge amount of work going from a collection of posts to a finished novel. Not just the actual writing part; I'm also going to have to research the different ways of publishing (traditional, hybrid, self-publishing, e-book or paper format etc.) But every journey starts with a single step, and I've made a start.
Image created by AI in Nightcafe Studio
Getting The Initial Text
The first step is to get the text of the posts I want to use.
The Hive app I used for this was Hive Report Card created by @holoz0r - an incredibly powerful tool which has lots of functions which allow you to dig down into the data on your posts, analysing it in numerous ways. The function I was using in this case was to download my post history, which can be done either in CSV or JSON format.
Once I'd done that, I picked out the posts I wanted - in this case, all the ones around the character of Alex Deroma - and pasted them into a Word document.
First Step - Decrapulation
With all the posts in a Word document, the initial process was to go through and strip out all the images and "fluff" text. That's to say, introductions, links to writing prompts, lists of related posts and things like that.
While I will be sure to credit Hive in the finished product, I'm not sure a normal reader would necessarily want links to writing prompts in Hive !
What this leaves me with is the post titles and actual body text.
Second Step - Chapters
The basic principle is that each post becomes the seed for a chapter in the novel. But this is where the nature of Hive jumps in with both feet and an almighty splash.
Something I've discovered over the last year or two is that creative writing posts in Hive very much have a "sweet spot". The best performing posts in terms of creative effort vs reward value seem to be a 3-5 minute read of around 650-1000 words.
Shorter than that can come off as low-effort posting (although Zapfics and 5-minute time constrained posts are very much an honourable exception to this), while longer posts tend to generate the same rewards as sweet spot ones and less engagement. Effectively, longer posts are just getting the automated votes because most Hivers don't have the attention span or time to commit to reading a single post for more than four or five minutes.
So Hive trains us to write with incredible efficiency. Storylines and plot twists are emphasised rather than descriptions of people and locations. But it means that every post forming the basis of a chapter in the novel is going to need serious work. Actually, in most cases, it turned into a total re-write. Not a bad thing; it means Hive posts act as a first draft of the novel, and what I'm now creating is already at second draft stage.
A key step at this point is working out which posts are making it into the novel, and in what order. Some of it is straightforward. The starting point is the "main sequence" of posts about Alex Deroma, which are very much in a chronological order. But there are also some tangential posts which can be incorporated that introduce other key characters or worldbuilding concepts. It took some juggling to work out what goes where !
Third Step - Wordcount
At this point, I took the decision that since the Alex posts formed two distinct series and storylines, I'd see if it was practical to turn just the first series into a novel, leaving the potential to then publish the second series as a sequel. This might be over-ambitious ! But the option is open to merge the two back together again if it become appropriate.
So I then did some quick research on book lengths. Anything under 40,000 words is considered to be a novella, and it appears that's a thoroughly unfashionable format at present.
For a novel in the sci-fi genre, and assuming you're not an established author writing a door-stopper of a book, it seems the goal to aim for is around 80,000 words. Drat. With all the fluff stripped out, I was at around 23,000. Lots of work to do !
I also looked at chapter length. A "standard" novel in UK format has about 400 words per page, and it's unusual in sci-fi novels to find a chapter length under around 5 pages. So that's about 2000 words per chapter. In other words each chapter is going to need to grow by a factor of three without bogging down or getting boring.
So that's close to where I'm at. In my next post I'll talk about the work I've just started building out each chapter and increasing the word count in a way that works.
This is turning out to be more work than I initially expected (silly me, I thought it was just going to be mashing the posts together and tidying up any typos.....), but although it's a major project it's very enjoyable doing something constructive with the Hive content I've made over the years.
There's definitely no promise that it'll ever actually turn into a published novel, but I'm going to give it my best shot !
I noticed your pic1000 entry was without an upvote. I gave you two in return for your last two posts.
Happy writing.
Thank you ! 😀
Very cool! It's a neat process to go through. I know for myself, compiling and de-crapifying the prompts was a multi-month process, but I'm super slow at that kind of thing. I hope the rewrite goes well for you, and I definitely agree that HIVE posts can act as a great first draft. I'm interested to see what path you take for publishing! Whatever you choose, I'll 100% be buying at least one copy if I can!
Cheers - I might tap you up for advice if I get stuck ! 😀
Always happy to provide whatever help I can!