Tuesday Tip: The Whiteboard, Post-Its, and Cheat Sheet Method

The whiteboard-and-Post-Its method is something I learned from Amy Knupp, and it really helped me in planning out my revision process on the novel. Apologies for the picture quality; that's not really what my cellphone is good at, but it works.

The method is similar to storyboarding, but I find it to be even more visually useful. Everyone has different things that work for them; this is just something that seems to work well for me. Take from it what you will.

You start out with a whiteboard that has been divided (use permanent marker, it makes life easier) into a number of squares. You want the squares to be around 5" by 5" so there is plenty of room. Each square represents one chapter.

Then you go to the office supply store (such a dangerous place!) and get a whole bunch of colored Post-Its. Amy recommends the Super Sticky kind, because regular ones will start to fall off after you move them around a couple times. Some of my Super Sticky ones started falling off anyway, so your mileage may vary.

You're going to be using the Post-Its on the board to help you figure out your storyline. If you know this scene comes before that plot point, you can arrange them in roughly where you think they will be, and you can always move them around later as you need to.

Use notes stacked on top of each other to denote separate scenes. "Scene" is sort of loose here—I mostly used it to mean changes in setting, but if the action moved through more than one setting I counted it as one scene.

Figure out what you want your colors to mean. I used the following colors:

• Green = setting. This is just a note to myself saying where the scene is taking place.
  
• Pink = scene contains female main character's point of view
  
• Blue = scene contains male main character's point of view
  
• Yellow = Subplot #1
  
• Purple = Subplot #2
  
• Orange = something important to the main plot
  
• Red = blood, sex, or death (hey, it's a vampire novel)
  

But you can use whatever colors to denote whatever you want, like character arc, clues or red herrings, romantic arc, etc.

Since I already had a working draft, I used the whiteboard to lay out where my novel was currently. I'd already started the revision, so the first two rows (chapters 1 to 8) were pretty well fleshed out. You can see that I left a bunch of white space in the third row. I knew that part needed a lot of revision, and I only had a little idea of what needed to be there (hence the two scenes in that row). You also might notice that a number of scenes are on the line between chapters. This is because the scene starts in one chapter and continues into the next.

As I kept revising and breaking longer chapters in to several shorter ones, I would update the whiteboard and also consult the Post-Its to see what I was short on. One thing I could see was a serious lack of yellow, purple, and blue in the middle. Now, I didn't need a lot of blue for this story, but I wanted to sort of check in between the blue section at the beginning and the blue section near the end. Here you can see I've added a little to the beginning of row three and made a few notes that I haven't found a place for yet down on the bottom row.

After much staring at the whiteboard and scribbling notes, I've found places for the scene bits I came up with previously, and filled in row three. Row four's been modified a little, and I've found places to add in the blue, yellow, and purple I was looking for. The red seems to be nicely distributed.

Then it was on to breaking up my super long chapters at the end. The old manuscript was 15 chapters; the new one ended up being 28. At this point I've got 24, and I've realized I'm going to have to add a chapter into row three. I also need more yellow at the end. In fact, I end up adding a whole bunch to that subplot, which rocked.

Finally, I've got all 28 chapters laid out. I can see that the subplots and the red bits are fairly evenly distributed. Now, as I move into the tweaking and editing stage, I make one more tool to help me. Like a cheat sheet for my novel, I make a document where each chapter is reduced to one line of text which contains the date in story-time (the novel takes place in 1999), the chapter word count, a brief summary, and what color Post-Its I used (not counting green or orange). Here's an example:


"1. 3442. F 05/14/99. Introduce [list of names], world. (PK, BU, YW, PU)"

The cheat sheet lets me find a particular scene faster than the whiteboard does, and also lets me see if any of the chapters are significantly longer or shorter than the others. It also helps me keep track of story time.

Between the cheat sheet and the whiteboard, I have a detailed map of the novel to use as I move around making editorial changes. It made my revision process soooo much easier. For example, by looking at the whiteboard I could see that I needed to add a little more yellow between chapters 13 and 22. By referencing the cheat sheet, I easily found a place in the action where I could slip in an aside, and added a cut scene to chapter 16. (I thought I had taken a final pic, but apparently not.)

When I was done using the whiteboard, I taped all the Post-It stacks to blank pieces of paper and numbered the chapters. I have these in a folder in case I need to go back to them during or after the writer's workshop next month.

While I don't think I could use this method to outline, which is what Amy does (I just can't outline, I have to pants it), I absolutely love it as far as revision goes, and I intend to use it on my next project.

'Tis the Season Not to Overload

It's December, and I was nowhere near completing NaNoWriMo. I'm good with that. Outside of my vacation I've been sticking to my 500 words a day on Project Toadstool, the new novel. Well, except for weekends. And you know, so what? I've made writing a part of my daily schedule and I'm pretty happy with that. There's no magical ruleset that you have to follow to be a writer other than you have to write. I'm writing. That's good enough for me. December is too insane to add more stuff to do.

On the less whiny side, I've discovered the fun of pantsing it again. I really have no idea of how I'm getting from the beginning of my novel to the end I have in mind, and I'm having a lot of fun finding out. So far I've come up with a whole bunch of new characters (I started with two) and a huge subplot. In fact, I'm not sure you can even call it a subplot, it's so big. Fun! And so much less stressful than trying to force myself to outline.

I've also got a few short story ideas to work on, and I'm re-energized to finish my rewrite of 1794. I get to work on those as much as I want – after my 500 words are done. So far, so good.

Now if only I had more vacation time so I could get some extra writing done…

Parentheses Are My New Best Friends

Last week I was working on 1794, trying to add in a new chapter. I sort of knew what I wanted to happen, but I was getting bogged down in the description. And then I had a breakthrough.

Those of you who follow this blog probably know by now that I hate editing. I hate it sooooo much. I pride myself on having fairly clean first drafts so that I can keep editing time to a minimum. Yes, I know first drafts are allowed to suck; I just don't want to have to clean them up later. So quite often I will spend a good amount of time thinking about exactly how I want to word the next section before I start typing.

I also have a problem with getting started each time I sit down. I'll open up the file, read over the last bit to see where I was at, and then sit there thinking for ten or fifteen minutes. When I have hours ahead of me this isn't much of an issue, but when I only have 40 minutes, as I do after work waiting for The Husband to come pick me up, it severely cuts into my productivity.

So last week I was staring at where I'd left off, trying desperately to get started up again. I was heading into a section of serious description—lots of inner turmoil and wasted energy for my main character, but I just couldn't pick up the thread. I'd been staring at this section for three days straight with almost no progress.

Suddenly I said "screw it, I don't want to write this section right now, and I don't have to, this is a first draft of this chapter."

I started a new paragraph, capped it with an open parenthesis, and started summarizing. This was totally freeform, including thoughts about what other characters not in the scene might be doing and how that would affect things, notes about character motivation, and even things like (T says something clever. Probably innuendo…T goes to (official's) house. There was a wiff of magic about the place. Ok, maybe not that, but something cool.)

I was able to drop in and out of the narrative as I chose, and after only a few minutes I knew where the scene was going, how it was going to tie into the next chapter (which was already written), plus I had come up with some cool subtext that needed to be worked into the preceding chapter. And once I had that down, I'd already been writing for awhile and was able to jump back to the descriptive bit that had derailed me originally and start pounding that out.

I think the reason this worked for me, when all other attempts to "outline" usually fail, is that I was working within my draft, within the story, but what I was writing wasn't actually first draft. My first drafts are not allowed to be throw-offs…but this? This wasn't even draft. It was just summary. It didn't even have to be coherent, which is good because it jumped around quite a bit, including sentences that stopped in the middle because I was done with that thought now. And typing it, as opposed to thinking about it, kept me on task and focused on one thought at a time. Normally when I "outline" in my head my thoughts tend to wander and not accomplish much.

The key for me seems to be not overthinking it. Write until I get stuck and then stream-of-consciousness for a bit until I know where I'm going again. And absolutely no editing the stream-of-consciousness. Bad grammar? Fine. Bad spelling? Not a problem. Don't have a name for that minor character yet? Skip it and use a placeholder. Overusing certain words? Who cares? It's all going to get deleted once I've written out that bit anyway. When I got to a place where I had an idea for what I actually wanted to say, I could just cap off the summary with an end parenthesis and start writing the narrative until I got hung up again. Then new open parenthesis and start summarizing again. I never had to stop typing, and as long as I'm typing I'm being productive.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Outlining: Do I Really?

Outlining. A contentious subject among writers; some feel lost without one, others couldn't outline ahead of time if their life depended on it. Most writing books espouse outlining in some form, as it generally saves the writer a lot of time and energy.

For many years, I thought I was a no-outline person. But a recent conversation has made me reconsider that view.

When I first started writing I was a total pantster. I had a handful of characters and a supposition, and I rarely had any idea what was coming beyond the next scene, or maybe two. Sometimes I had an idea for what the ending might be, but often it changed a lot before I got far into the story.

When I started writing short stories, a lot of times the characters-plus-supposition was the bulk of the story. These are the characters, this is the situation, this is how they got in the situation, and this is the resolution. Boom. Done.

Note that there isn't a lot of middle in this. The middle was always what messed me up before: if I had the beginning and the ending, I had no idea how my characters got from one to the other. Now, with the stories so much shorter, there was a lot less middle to muddle through. I was usually starting close enough to the end that by the time I got through the set-up I was almost to the end anyway, especially since I knew that part of the middle (and possibly part of the end) was going to be the nookie bit. And the ending had to be HEA or HFN.

I didn't think much of this transition, because as far as I was concerned I still couldn't outline. I tried, to be sure. I tried using note cards, I tried doing summaries, I tried drawing plot lines. Nothing worked for me. I'd just sit there and stare at whatever I was supposed to be writing on, because I couldn't figure out how I was supposed to get the story down. My brain would tangent like crazy until I gave up and started just writing the darn story.

So imagine my surprise when I was sitting down with E Victoria Flynn and Christi Craig over coffee, complaining about plotting, and Victoria says to me, "Yeah, but you outline."

"What?!"

"You do. You know where your story is going before you start writing it."

My first thought was, "Well, of course I know where it's going. How could I start if I didn't?" And then I remembered how I used to write, and I realized she might be right. This was a bit of a shock.

I still can't do a traditional outline. I spent some time in the last couple weeks trying to do an outline for 1794, a story I've already written, and still failed miserably. I know roughly what I want to change, and roughly how I might go about it, but I'm still not sure what the actual form will take or how the two characters are going to react to the changes. But I've managed to get the first three chapters revised without a clear outline, and I think I know where I'm taking the changes from here.

Does that make me an outliner? You be the judge.