Of course, most of my notes are just how I figure out what does and doesn’t work. Probably none of those ideas will come to fruition, but writing them out gave me enough juice to move on. Here’s me trying to figure out who the crap one of the “bad guys” is: An idea occurred to me mid-idea, and for some reason, it required writing sideways. Sometimes I write in stream-of-consciousness style as I try to sort through a sticking point. You want your characters decisions to feel natural and consistent with who they are you want plot points to flow organically you want your passion for the project to always stay high (more on this next week). The key to writing a novel is to be constantly willing to change. I will do this a thousand times before I finish the project because the scene ideas I’d first planned no longer work as I actually draft. I listed different plot points I kinda knew I wanted in the story and then tried to number them in a logical order. And then try to organize them with numbers. It looks like a serial killer…or 5-year-old wrote it.) You might not be able to tell, but the top of the page is actually the bones of a scene…(Yeah. Or I might BLAST EPIC MUSIC and write any ideas that pop into my head. Sometimes I write the bones of a scene or snippets of dialogue that have already occurred to me. In fact, my second step is to open up the notebook and start writing. I don’t do anything particularly fancy with my notebooks. I filled the fist notebook after half the book. These notebooks are BOTH for the third book in the SS&D series. It should also come as no surprise that when I began drafting, I petered out after only 30 pages. 😛 This notebook doesn’t have too many notes. 🙂Īnd, just in case you’re curious, here are some notebooks from other projects in the past year: This notebook was actually longer than my usual ones, and I filled up HALF before I even started drafting. They are sitting on a shelf devoted to spiral bound notebooks like these. I have two other notebooks that apply to my earlier versions of this story.

I’ve thrown out everything I wrote before and am only keeping character’s names, personalities, a few plot points, and the town where the story is set. Now, as some of you know, I’m actually rewriting this book.

So here’s my notebook for this year’s NaNoWriMo project: (I used to try to use the same notebooks for multiple projects, but that was just too disorganized in an already pretty hectic process.) At the very least, maybe it will let you see the usefulness of some planning before you draft as well as the absolute, non-negotiable need for flexibility in an outline.įirst, I get an unused spiral-bound notebook. But then again, perhaps it WILL help you. It’s my method, right? And it’s a very fluid, not-too-organized, definitely not-too-strict method. But my method of planning is erratic at best.ĭisclaimer: this may not help YOU plan a book at all. So as I mentioned last Friday, I only recently realized that I’m actually a planner and not a pantser.

One subject spiral bound notebook