B1P Day 57: Just-in-Time Scene Plotting – Author Dad

B1P Day 57: Just-in-Time Scene Plotting

I finished my last coaching project well ahead of schedule and got in some time to write this morning!

In the past, I mapped out all of my scenes in detail for the entire book, using the template from Lisa Cron’s Story Genius, that describes not just the action, but how it impacts the character’s emotional journey, before I started writing word one.

The upside to that method is that once I start writing, I am doing nothing but working on words, and each day, I make progress toward my word total. But the downside is that I would often get off track. Scenes wouldn’t work out the way that I thought they might, and that would require some unnatural maneuvering to get the story back on track. That’s what I’m aiming to avoid with this book.

So far, I have created the loose beats that I want the story to hit for each of the characters along the way and for now, I think I’m going to try to leave those as sufficient signposts. For my actual scene cards, I’m only going to create them just-in-time as each character’s story needs them. That should allow me some flexibility if the characters take me in a different direction.

The downside is that I won’t start looking at the minor characters that I need or setting descriptions until I get to the point in the story that I need them, so I won’t have that clean progress of first draft words every day like I did in the past. I’m going to have to pause after each scene to plan out the next scene and fill in the characters and settings. But that should make each of them more relevant, as well.

Based on the advice from Story Engineering, I want each scene to be its own satisfying short story, too, with a complete arc centered around a central point, so that is going to require a little more thinking as I approach each new scene.

It’s a completely new approach for me, but I’m excited to try it.

For now, I’m working on the first scene card, and I already have a minor character plus a setting that need creation before I can write.

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