25 Ways To Plot, Plan and Prep Your Story

25 Ways To Plot, Plan and Prep Your Story.

I tend to do it Chapter by Chapter and Scene by Scene, but I have tried a couple of these. As a scriptwriter who has recently been turning a couple of scripts into short stories I can raise some caution about the Script and Dialogue pass methods. One problem with these methods (for me, anyways) is that the dialogue tends to overwhelm the prose, so you can end up with weak prose stringing together strong dialogue if you’re not careful. Then again, if you’re a dialogue-based writer anyways who tends to be minimalist in your prose, those methods might just the thing to get the whole story on paper ASAP.

I thought it was neat to see J.K. Rowling’s spreadsheet approach, and the Index Card approach intrigues me a bit. It’s interesting to see how the commentors point out that if you have a board with all these notes about your book in front of physically at your workstation it forces you to keep focus on that project even when you’re not thinking about it directly. The Collage idea is also interesting, and I have started to do some of that with a current project by tossing pictures I find inspiring into a folder as I do research for it.

A good article, and recommended reading for any writer! You just might learn a way to improve your writing or planning.

Rob

%d bloggers like this: