Doing Something Different

Friday, July 14th, 2006 | Uncategorized

When I write, I’m usually a panster. I know what I want to happen in the story and how I want it to end, but I’ve never actually plotted it all out. So, I tried two new things today. The first was Fast Plotting, a technique I learned about on Holly Lisles website. I didn’t follow her method exactly, but I figured out a way to make it work for me.

First figure out who your primary viewpoint characters are. Well, duh! That should be obvious, right? Shouldn’t you do this anyway. Yes, but bare with me okay. Second, decide how long you want your story to be. Then, decide how long you want each scene to be. Once you figure that out, decide how many scenes you’re going to dedicate to each viewpoint character.

Since I only have two viewpoint characters it was easy for me to just divide them up between my hero and heroine. But if you’re plotting, say a 90-100,000 novel, you might have more than two viewpoint characters. You might have a villain and a friend or two also. So, it’s up to you to decide how to divide that up.

Next, get out the index cards. How ever many scenes you have in your book, that’s how many notecards you’ll need. Now, write a one sentence scene you want to happen in the book, one on each card. Hopefully, you’ll use up all your cards and maybe even need more. I did, which made me very happy. After I did that, I put the cards in order of how I wanted the story to progress.

Then, I turned the card over and broke the scene down even further, basically the action and the reaction and decided whose point of view the scene was going to be in and wrote the characters name on the card.

What I’ve described here is a very short and kinda different version of Ms. Lisles method, but it really worked for me. I ended up with 13 scenes that I wanted to be 1000 words each since I’m writing a short story. I wrote my first scene and it ended up being 1450 words. Wow! Aren’t you proud of me. I certainly am.

Since this post ended up being longer than I anticipated, I’ll wait until tomorrow to share the other “something different” I did that helped me a lot too. It’ll give me something else to post. LOL

Cheers,

:-) Lyric

Oh, if you want to read the article I read, click here. It’s called Notecarding: Plotting Under Pressure.

5 Comments to Doing Something Different

Stacy Dawn
July 14, 2006

Yay on getting ahead! I’ve heard a number of people use the index cards, must work.

Amanda Brice
July 14, 2006

I’ll have to try the index cards… :)

Mia Romano
July 14, 2006

Sounds like a very neat idea. I am such a panster, and will have to try this new way of doing something. Thanks for the comment on my blog about my artwork. I am having fun with it!

Amie Stuart
July 16, 2006

GAAAAAAAA I can’t do index cards and I can’t do boxes (Debra Dixon). They *shudder* ….I’m just a linear kinda gal. I love the Snowflake Method and Vogler’s Hero’s Journey. I know Dixon does a workshop on THJ and GMC but *shudder* boxes. I. Just. Can’t.

Lyric
July 16, 2006

LOL Amie….It’s worked for my current WIP. We’ll see if it works for others. I hope it does. :-) I’ve tried the Snowflake method before but it’s such a looooonngggg process to me. I guess you gotta find what works for you and stick to it.

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