A Solid Three-Stage Book Plan
How do you define a solid three-stage book plan without writing a single line of the novel? Abigail Perry presented her Three Stages of a Solid Book Plan at this years Perfect your Process Summit.
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Structure
Revision Planning with Troy Lambert
One of the sessions of last year’s writers’ summits covered revision planning with Troy Lambert. At Daniel David Wallace’s Revising and Editing Workshop, Lambert presented a solid and concise approach to revising a novel.
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The Skeleton Draft
Navigating a path from start to finish of a novel can be hard for both plotters and free-writers; enter the Skeleton Draft.
The Skeleton Draft is an idea-dump. Maybe you outlined the novel using a story structure such as the Hero’s Journey or any of the five, seven, seventeen or twenty-four point methods. Or maybe you have a scant clue of your story without a real structure in mind. The Skeleton Draft is a means to dive into the story and explore characters, conflicts and events without getting hung up on prose before you really have the idea worked out.
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Dan Wells’ Seven-Point Story Structure
Dan Wells’ Seven-Point Story Structure came from the author’s 2010 BYU presentation. Taking his cue from the Star Trek Roleplaying game Narrator’s Guide, wells utilised the Seven-Point Story Structure as a plotting and outlining tool.
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Turning Points and Plot Points
All story structures include turning points and plot points. Whether it has seven, seventeen or twenty-four chapters, somewhere in that structure you hit key turning points or plot points that change the direction of the story. Without them the story is a flat line.
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Avoiding Prologues and Exposition
Can you write certain genres while avoiding prologues and exposition?
So many prologues, so little time… to get the reader to turn the page. For many, ‘prologue’ equals ‘put down.’
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How to End a Chapter
After sentences, paragraphs, and scenes, the next question is how to end a chapter? A vital building block in delivering a story, the chapter has the most visible beginning and ending.
Chapters are structural in shaping your story. They can’t just stop at a random thought. They mustn’t meander to a mumbling non-conclusion, or fade out like bad pop songs.
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Bridging Scenes Don’t Exist
Controversial opinion coming up: bridging scenes don’t exist. The notion of a ‘bridging scene’ came from a comment on a previous topic on scene structure:
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How to Structure a Scene
As the link between individual sentences and whole chapters, you have to know how to structure a scene. Because scenes in fiction are micro-stories of their own.
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More Scenes in Each Chapter
Working through a reverse outline of Book One, I’m breaking down the action of the novel as part of the story edit. The revelation of this exercise is there are more scenes in each chapter than I thought.
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