Sunday, February 24, 2013

Story Boarding

So while working on my current novel (which I'm co-writing with my friend Andrew (yes, that Andrew)), I've come to find that there's a bit of an order of events issue, or continuity issue. We plotted it out pretty thoroughly before we started writing but once you divide bits and work on them separately, things might pop up in the wrong order. So I sat down on Saturday and started plotting the order of events like this:


While I originally wanted to just read through the text and re-organize, my attempt to do that left me looking at all the edits I want to make and was ultimately too overwhelming. Making a list on Word or in a notebook was still not working for me (it was way too long and also overwhelming to look at). Finally I settled down with a folder and sticky notes and I wrote essential plot points down and put them in order. This way I can easily see what's what (instead of reading through a whole list) and I can easily re-organize when necessary. What I've got in the picture above isn't even the entire book, so I've got more to add but I feel like it won't be as overwhelming to look at as my other two options. Just figured I'd share it with other writers in case they get caught wanting to move scenes around but feel overwhelmed with long lists or reading through 20-30 pages of text.

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