Just to review, here’s my NaNoWriMo plan:
Step 1: Write one complete sentence summarizing each scene
Step 2: Turn each sentence into a five sentence paragraph.
Step 3: Turn each paragraph into five paragraphs. (I’m writing step 3 in red to help it stick out)
Step 4: Turn the five paragraphs into a narrative (Not started yet.)
I’ve started Step 3 today and it’s going faster than I thought it would. It’s really helping me to plan out my scenes. I take the paragraph summary of a scene (step 2) and expand it to around five or six paragraphs. What is happening is this: I’m doing a brain dump of everything that can happen in that scene. It’s pretty much in chronological order and I include questions of possible ways the scene could go (Could she stay and watch the murder or run screaming? Maybe he looks like he’s going to kill his dad with the stone sculpture, No, he changes his mind and orders the robot to do it.)
Step 3 is ending up looking like a script for a play or a screenplay for a movie. Lots of dialogue with descriptions of actions, settings and clothing. I’ve found some videos that talk about this process:
The method I’m using is also like a course I took on Udemy a couple of years ago. Sean Platt, a prolific writer,
How to Plan and Outline Novels (Using Scrivener) | Udemy
As I mentioned in a recent blog, I’m also using techniques from The Snowflake Method and also Save the Cat Writes a Novel. I’m also using Story Genius processes. So, I’m combining a lot of ways of writing a novel.
Word count: 6772
Andrew M. Friday 