Works in Progress
First draft:
Editing: The Amulet of Sìochàin
Subscribe by email!
Login
| Plotting with Sentences |
| Wednesday, 19 January 2011 15:14 |
|
The most useful technique I've learnt so far from Holly Lisle's How To Think Sideways and How To Revise Your Novel courses is the idea of the scene sentence. Essentially, it's one line that describes the key things which happen in a scene. I'm not talking details here, obviously - it's about focusing on the things that really matter. Since everything I write is done in scenes, this has been really helpful for me. It seems like a simple thing, but I've found that it really helps me to focus, at every stage of the novel writing process. Holly has a great formula for actually writing the sentences, but essentially it's about these questions: what's happening in this scene that's really important? Who does it affect? And how does it move the story forward? You just write one sentence per scene. And the really key thing about it for me has been finding out whether 'scenes' really are scenes or whether they're actually just drivel. I'm recalling this off the top of my head, so apologies if I'm misquoting, but this line from the lessons sums it up perfectly: You have written a scene when something important changes. So if I write my scene sentence and find that there's nothing important going on there, it isn't a scene. This was crucial for the major edits on The Amulet of Sìochàin - there were quite a few 'scenes' that I didn't even try to rework - I just deleted them, because they didn't add anything to the story. The idea is to end up with one sentence per scene. But sometimes, lots of important things have to happen at once, and in the plotting stages when I'm trying to make sure I remember everything that has to take place, I sometimes end up with several sentences for each scene. (It's either that or one sentence plus lots of notes, and I prefer it all in one place.) When it comes to edits though, those scene synopses will be cut down to one simple sentence (I think Holly recommends 30 words) per scene. So today I've spent an hour or so writing out scene sentences for the rest of my WIP, which I started for NaNoWriMo. I'd done a bit before I started writing in November, and when I started to run out I'd plan the next few scenes ahead, but that started to get more difficult as I realised that I didn't really know what was going to happen next. So a few mindmaps and helpful lists later, I'd worked out most of the important things which still need to happen in this story. Then it was just a matter of fitting them together into scene-sized chunks and writing my sentences. I've put them in a logical order, but now that all of the important plot points are written down I can easily rearrange them if necessary, particularly with the storyboard feature in Storybox. As of tomorrow, then, it's back to the first draft. And now that I know where I'm going, I'm excited again. And I used to call myself a pantser...! Where do you fall on the plotting scale? Any tips for getting scene ideas down? |