In my last post, I talked about using a story board to plot your outline. I set up the FATE story I’d written using this method, and found the results to be useful. I’ll show you how to read it, and you can see for yourself. You don’t even have to know what each of the Post-Its means in order to see the rhythm and tempo of the novel.
I divided the whiteboard into 36 squares: 6 across and 6 down, which match up to the 36 chapters in the FATE manuscript. The first thing I did was to circle CHAPTER 18 and label it as the MIDPOINT. Then I used a different Post-It for each character. There’s a green arrow for action, a pink heart for a romantic scene, a yellow star for the villain, and red apple for a key location. Check it out.
You can see that there needs to be some action added around scene 5 or 6, and maybe 9 or 10. Scene 18 was labeled as the midpoint. Did it work out that way? Yeah, pretty much. I surprised myself. Scene 19 only has one character in it (other than the Hero). It might be a candidate for dropping, but I know that scene is a pivotal one, so I’ll let it stay. Although I might try to pump up the volume a little. Scene 34 is empty except for the Hero. It’s a candidate for dropping, since it’s a downtime scene before the big finale where the Hero tried to figure out what to do next.
Piece of cake, right? Give it a try!
For screenplays I eventually use three-by-five index cards and end up with about 200 or so, each representing a scene. Thankfully, novel-writing is looser, but you do have to plan. I like doing both. It appears you’re on the path you need to be on.