How to Plot a Novel

THE ABOVE INSTAGRAM POST (1/14/20) reveals why I haven't been blogging. I've written a number of books for corporations and a couple for myself, plus editing a few more, but I've never written a novel. About 10 years ago I started to think seriously about doing so with a screenplay I was researching. The traveling I was doing in a bid to research the story, provided fodder that turned out to be much more interesting as a novel. For the movie script I was limited by time and words, and the true historical story just got better the more I traveled and the more I researched related material and characters. (The genealogical sites like Ancestry.com and Geni.com were very helpful).

I JOKE that when I have money I make a movie, and when I don't I write or edit a book. We're still trying to make a couple of movies. While I wait for one screenplay to gain some traction in L.A. (there are things a-foot) and while I wait for the last book to be printed in mass in China, and while the H U G E sailboat refit project is under winter wraps until late March....I dug out the novel effort, last worked on in 2013. Altogether, I've worked on it over 10 years of research, plotting, and writing. And every time I pick it up again, there's more juicy information or ideas to include.

THE ABOVE 6 POINTS are obviously an oversimplification. One of the unlisted things in writing any story, that I always recommend to story clients, is to read lots of material like that which you're trying to write. In that stead, and for his novel project, Pam and I just finished reading out loud to each other Ken Follett's PILLARS OF THE EARTH. It was a great read. I felt myself getting emotionally involved with the characters, and even got a mild case of vertigo one night. None of that happens when I watch a movie. Movies are over so quickly. But Pillars, due to its length (about 400K words) can last for weeks on end, two hours every night. Reading and hearing Follett's cadence for words will help when I start revising and reading out loud my own work. (Update 2023 - Follett had an effective on me. The novel is finally done and released, and it's 372,000 words. Agh! Had to self-publish it under my distribution banner since no publisher would touch it. LOL! — LINKED HERE:  The Wizard Clip Haunting: A True Early American Ghost Story.)

The image above is actually the carded plot of the novel I'm working on. I've actually written about 50K words of it, but stopped to revisit the plot and fully card it out. Here are the steps I've taken over the last few years, weeks, and days:

1. Researched the historical events. There area a few short books and dozens of articles and references in history books of the period and event itself.

2. Used the Story Diamond to identify the 13 main plot points.

3. Wrote 3 drafts of the movie screenplay.

4. Got some good and some bad notes.

5. Let it sit for a couple years as I went onto other projects.

6. Took two road trips to research the actual events and my imagined events. One to New Orleans and Pittsburg, and a second trip to Maryland, West Virginia and eastern Pennsylvania. Both trips were immensely rewarding in terms of discovering ironic "true to history" material, which widened the story's scope—fodder I could not include in the screenplay without turning it into a mini-series.

7. Poured over the hundreds of photographs and documents and books and interview transcripts collected on those two trips. I couldn't get myself to commit to a novel and there was no way all the juicy discoveries could be included in a screenplay. Frustrating.

8. Made another revision of the screenplay and pitched it a few time. No takers.

9. Let it sit for a few years...went sailing, etc.

10. About 8 years ago, I wrote a few chapters as a test of my novel writing skills. I wasn't satisfied. Put it aside again. Then, last month I read Dwight Swain's "Techniques of $elling Writers" and "Hit Lit" by James Hall (recommended by my friend The Other Chris Pratt)  Both books revealed that I was doing a lot of things right, and they gave me the courage to take the novel seriously. So,  I re-edited those early chapters and wrote a few more, read them to Pam, and we both liked them.

11. But the original Story Diamond was not geared for a novel, but for the movie. And I also realized that the Diamond was not formatted (being in the diamond shape) to track subplots easily. For that I needed to horizontal surface. I have a vertically mounted 4'x8' Story Diamond on casters that I roll out for clients who come to my office for beating out a story. In that process we use a drawer full of colorful 3"x3" Post-Its. 

Stored behind the Story-Diamond-on-casters are a couple pieces of 3/16" black Foamcor I use for small set lighting (or blocking the light).  I got them out and set them side-by-side on their sides behind my desk, and opened the drawer of Post-It's. Now, I was able to break the story according to characters and subplots and keep each on its own colorful row. The picture on the left is 3/4 of the whole thing toward the end of the exercise. (I found the Post-It's stuck better once I dusted off the Foamcor.)



But I was not going to be able to let this piece of Foamcor sit as a reference in the walkway behind my desk for the year it would take to write. And as more ideas came, I'd need to write out some detail notes that would not fit on the Post-It's. So I opened up Apple's Keynote, which I use for creating the slides for my workshops, and opened a new file that was 4,000 pixels (W) and 1,500 pixels (H) and recreated the Post-It plot board into Keynote. It took me a day to create the file you see here.

Although I work on a Medium speed Mac Pro with two large displays (which I use to edit 2K and 4K video files) Keynote is not designed for such a large file. It claims to be only 451K (not big, really), but with this many cards and objects on a single large "slide" it requires some patience. The app only slowed down, however, toward the end. (I use Keynote as well (formatted vertically) for Story Diamond files.) Keynote is much better (on the Mac) for this sort of thing than anything else, including Power Point. Very easy to create, color and align objects, and change the size of both cards and text in them. [BTW: these are TEXT boxes filled with color, not rectangles with text overlaid in them. Thus, there is ONE object per card to manipulate, not two.]

12. Once I got all the cards in place (along with a number of story notes (the cards with a lot of text on them), I grouped them with green rectangles to denote preliminary chapter groupings, with each card within a green rectangle being a scene or a sequel. The light pink near the top row are my SCENE GOALS, and the dark pink are the SCENE DISASTERS. The SEQUELS are not always individually carded but are implied by the contents. The blue is the antagonist, and the other colors are minor characters. The white boxes at the top represent most of the 13 traditional beats of a story, and the yellow boxes are dates—since this is a historical story that takes place over a 37 year period with both of the story taking place over just 4 years.

13. I write long form projects in Scrivener, as I did the first draft of this project's screenplay (I finish up screenplays in Final Draft). I love Scrivener's flexibility for moving text blocks around. So I will use the old screenplay file for the novel. While I have about 50K already written of the first chapters, I will now populate the Scrivener folders/chapters with the chapters designated by the green rectangles in the Keynote Card file, and identify the doc-files/scenes within each Scrivener chapter by the individual cards in the Card Plot file.

14. Finally, as I write in Scrivener on my right display, the Keynote card file will occupy my left screen, along with other writing aids like my favorite: http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml. Thus, I can keep updating the card plot as I write, and it allows me a bird's-eye view of the story, showing me how the scene I'm currently writing connects to the whole.

Blessings,

stan