I have finally submitted.
Way back when I was a librarian, I did some reading to the grade nines in my school. I researched the author Gary Paulson as well as read from some of his stories. When I did background research on him, I discovered that he uses storyboards. He writes it all out on a long sheet of paper on his wall. He knows what is going where and why and when and all that detailed sort of thing. At the time I laughed to myself. Who would ever put that much work into their story? Surely you can keep it all flowing in your mind and it all stays together and focused, right?
Not.
(Please note this man has written over 70 books and knows what he is doing.
I on the other hand, have no published books and sometimes know what I am doing.)
It certainly is tricky to step back and see everything when you have two subplots competing in a 115,000 word document. Somehow, it is a bit difficult to get far enough away from that beast. And I tried. Oh, I tried. I wrote down all the scenes in a notebook. Sometimes I even wrote down all the scenes along with their purpose. Honestly, I learned that I can excuse anything. This scene? Oh, well it is there for humour! I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that my scene list didn’t help me out much. Still I rejected the storyboard idea. Too much work. What a waste of sticky notes. What a lot of tinkering. It won’t actually help. I’d better check my email instead or read a book on writing that will hand me my magic answer on why my book has no focus and what I can do to fix it.
Right. You can pretty much guess how that worked out for me too, can’t you?
On the up side, I learned a lot and fixed a lot of other things that were wrong with my manuscript that I may not have otherwise noticed.
Finally, I came across an online course on saving your manuscript. Oooh, a $32 solution! Plus a very valid excuse to check my email several times a day? Golden.
The instructor recommends you take your printed-out ms and tag it with sticky notes–things that pop out as not working for you. (By the way, printing out my ms is another thing I procrastinate on. I’m cheap, what can I say?) As you flip through, you’re to keep the idea in mind that any action begets a reaction which leads to a decision. That decision leads to a new action, reaction and decision. It’s so logical and obvious that I’m shocked that I didn’t come across the idea sooner. A few days before this lesson, I had written out each scene (one or two words about each scene) with an arrow to the next scene. Looking at this I could see some things were not flowing the way I wanted them to. But still, what could I do? Then I was provided with the brilliant action/reaction/decision tool. Using this flowchart thingy, I took each scene and wrote it on a coloured stick note along with whether it was an action/reaction/decision.
Naturally, some scenes were simply an action and some had an action and a reaction with the following scene holding the decision. Sometimes, I had a scene that had none of the above. Just a brilliant baby that I was unable to slaughter in edits. But now I can see what pesky scenes are interrupting my flow and the story’s focus. Those scenes I noted on yellow stickies. The romance/home life plot is pink. The work life plot is green.
I stuck all those stickies on my wall. Damn things keep falling off though–even after getting heated by the blow dryer to see if it would make the adhesive more sticky (it doesn’t appear to). Anyway, when they aren’t fluttering to the floor and amusing my cats, they give me a chance to step back and see where I have the different plots bunched up, where things slow down and where I have to do some edits.
My next job is to figure out how many pages each scene is and write it on my sticky notes. When I do that, I think I will be able to address pacing. How? Well, I will have my action/reaction/decision listed there and depending on how important a turning point it is–or not–I will be able to determine if the length of the scene is reflective of what is happening action/reaction/decision wise. Yes! More purposeful edits lined up for the future.
I think I can do this. Oh heck, I know I can. And I’m excited because…oh hell…this is going to cost me a lot of mochas as motivation, isn’t it?
Tags: writing by Jean
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