Thickening the plot

The kids are back at school and I’m back to work on the outline for my novel. I don’t know why I have to make life so difficult for myself, with my two main characters and their complicated, interwoven story lines, but that’s the shape my book has taken. Luckily, I’ve learned to enjoy the process of planning out scenes and tying together plot threads!

Creating a scene-by-scene outline for the whole novel is a very thinky, time-intensive process. If you’ve been following my blog (or if you’ve read my archives), you’ll know that I tend to use a colourful, cue card based system that lets me shift around scenes quickly and easily.

This time around, though, I’ve been trying a different type of outline. I’ve still got bare-bones information on cue cards, but I’ve also been creating a more narrative-based outline, where I describe each scene in order, with one paragraph per scene. This is helpful because it lets me trace the threads of my story arcs from one scene to the next, which will hopefully result in a less episodic draft of the book.

All told, it looks like I’m going to have about 75 scenes in the novel. For some of these, I’ll be able to adapt work from last year’s draft, but the majority of the book needs to be rewritten. (Gulp!) I’ve been making good progress on the outline, so I should be able to get back to writing scenes by the end of September.

And if you’ve read this far, I’ve got a little bonus content for you! This Tuesday, I was invited to participate at a reading series at the Visual Arts Centre in Westmount. It was a great evening with some wonderful local writers and musicians. I read excerpts from “Tag,” a short story that I wrote this summer. Hopefully it’ll be published at some point, but in the meantime you can watch my reading here:

3 thoughts on “Thickening the plot”

How interesting and how different everyone’s approach is. I am impressed by your level of organizations! Certainly I feel sometimes that my characters are leading me around rather than the other way. So glad you put the clip in…..at least I got to see a snippet of the reading!

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Thanks Isobel! I certainly didn’t have any kind of plan for my first draft of the novel, but over the years I’ve figured out the structure I want to use and an outline has become indispensable.

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