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Aside from House Stuff, bar stuff, writing stuff, copyediting stuff… As the July Author of the Month at Romance Divas, I’m giving a week long workshop on Subplots and Plotboarding at their forums. If you’ve always wondered how I make my plotboards, come on over and check it out! To help track the various threads in my book during revisions, I made a new plot board. It’s probably the most complex I’ve ever made, due to the fact that it focuses on threads I wanted to make sure got their fair share of screentime, as well as plots and subplots. Voila: I’ve seen a lot of folks coming to my blog looking for plotting board advice in the last few days, and I’ve also seen a lot of blogs directing people here, or otherwise commenting on the method. Some are snarky, “Make sure you put on your sunglasses!” (I think referring to the fact that post it notes tend to come in neon colors?), some are skeptical, and some are supportive. The methodology of creating a plotting board is probably one of my most frequent of frequently asked questions. I’ve answered many of them on this blog. I’m thinking of doing a big, be-all, end-all plot board post and then putting it up on my sidebar, but that will have to wait until after this week, because I’m on deadline. But again, to answer the most common questions: 1. Different squares are for different scenes. So today is the day of the big Under the Rose Booksigning. Luckily, I do not have time to be growing too nervous, since I will be working incredibly hard on the next book up until the time we hop in the car and head out to said booksigning. And since I know that at least one person got to my blog by Googling my name and “book signing” today, I hope that I will have at least one companion not named Sailor Boy. I do, however, have a tendency to get nervous about these things, in a very middle-school “I’m throwing a party, what if no one comes?” kind of way. (Sailor Boy’s attitude is “More candy for me!” Oh, yes, there’s candy. Did I mention the candy?) I’m also a bit nervous because my head is so much into ROS(B) right now that I’m afraid of giving everything away if someone asks me a question about UTR. As we established tonight during board games with my best friend and her husband, I have no poker face. None at all. I haven’t actually done very many official booksignings. I did one last year on the release date of my first book, and all my friends came, so that was fun. I did one at RWA, and one at my house, and one at a bookstore in my hometown after a TARA meeting. All of those had pretty captive audiences. Other than that, I’ve been the queen of the drive-by booksigning. In other news, I spent quite a long time on Monday trying to make a plotting board for ROS(B) to help me with the revisions. It was difficult for two reasons: 1) my method of plotting-board usage has changed somewhat wince the last time I made one for one of my books, and I hadn’t really realized how much that would effect me, and 2) the Office Depot near my house had a pretty crappy selection of Post-It notes, which lead to me being forced to use colors that I probably shouldn’t have. In the past, I’ve used a green that is more like the color of Secret Society Girl’s cover, but this green I’ve been using now is pretty close to the yellow color, so it makes the board look out of whack. Anyway, here it is, purposefully blurry to avoid spoilers:
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a fan of Four-Act Structure. (I hear it’s just three act structure with the middle act split in two, and I can’t speak to that, because what I do know is that I’ve never once been able to wrap my head around three act structure, but four act structure seems as natural as breathing to me. However, whatever works for you.) And when I was working on a visual aid for a workshop I did on subplots back in May for TARA, I made up a plotting board for Pride & Prejudice, to show how the subplots weaved through each other and crescendoed during each of the mini act-climaxes of that book. To help illustrate that point, I put each act of the book on a different line of the board. What I didn’t realize is that I could do the exact same thing when boarding my own books to help me out with structure. I was making the plot board and looking at it in despair, thinking that the storyline was really sloppy and meandering, and then I thought, why don’t I split it up into acts? And then when I did, I realized that I’d actually color coded things wrong, and that what I thought were two subplots were actually one. It’s also much more clear what my focus is going to need to be in the revision stage of the manuscript.* Obviously, I need to do some tightening in the third act. I think part of the issue I’ll be dealing with is that I’m not quite sure which climax of the second act is the “real” climax. There are two subplots that climax (or mini-climax) there and they don’t happen at exactly the same time. I chose the “act break” as the first subplot to climax. And now that I think of it, there needs to be some orange in that second square in the bottom row. That’s my other issue, I have “one more” plot thread going on in this book than I did in UTR. Though that’s not really accurate. I’m just counting something that I know I have to go in and weave more as its own plot thread, to help me out with revisions. I may have to redesign this a little, come to think of it, since we’re looking at a very different type of plot progression in ROS(B) than we are in UTR. I think this is, in a strange way, a more introspective novel, despite the fact that it’s far more overtly suspenseful than any in the series to date. Oops, should that have been spoiler-whited out? * Note: Acts do NOT need to be the same length. In modern fiction, the fourth act should actually be quite short. Climax and resolution only. Happy Independence Day, readers in the U.S.A.! Boy, did we show those Brits, huh? Having lived in a bunch of different places, I am fascinated by the way folks in various regions of the country celebrate this holiday. Growing up in Florida, it seemed mostly like an excuse to go to the beach for our fireworks (but maybe that was because I was a kid). In Boston, it seemed to bring out the pugilistic side of the residents. They all sat around talking about how kickass the colonists were during the Tea Party and oh, those Adams boys! In D.C., it almost always sparks philosophical discussions about the “American experiment” and what the founding fathers were really saying with that brassy Declaration of theirs. I swear, it’s like I stumbled into an episode of The West Wing around here. I love this town. Today, Sailor Boy and I (and a bunch of our friends, and two puppies) are celebrating our independence in a most Marylander fashion: we’re eating a bushel of blue crabs. And, um, talking about democracy. Also, thanks everyone for delurking yesterday. It was really nice to meet some new folks, and confirm that, in fact, the evil biumvirate of Shannon McKelden and Gena Showalter have been spying on me. Watch out for those two, guys. They are completely sneaky. At times, I’ve been known to read one of their books and even miss my train stop. So you see how they can’t be trusted. The winner of the Susan Kearney Giveaway is: THE ANTI-WIFE. Please email me at the email address listed at right with your address to receive your prize. And I do want to clarify something that came up in the comments yesterday: I have no expectation that anyone hanging out on the blog has read my books. Naturally, it would be lovely if you did, but if not, that’s cool too. Either way is fine. There are blogs I read written by authors whose books aren’t my thing. (And, um, whenever I feel guilty about it I just recommend the book in question to someone who DOES like the genre the blogger is writing. And then everyone is happy.) Okay, moving on. Yesterday, in the comments section, barratt, who thinks I should watch The Black Donnellys (is it on Netflix yet?), asked: Actually, I recommend jumping in and making one. It’s really one of those things where explaining all the different methods is not going to work half as well as you just sitting down and giving it a whirl. It’s kind of like a few weeks ago, where I insisted up down and backwards that collaging didn’t work for me, and then I tried it and I really loved it. Green eggs and ham, indeed. (Unfortunately, I have yet to solve the problem that the collage revealed, but hey, knowing is half the battle, right?) It’s a pretty cheap project, luckily, so you don’t have to invest much if it turns out that the boards don’t work for you. So: Grab a poster board (or “whiteboard”/dry-erase board) and some colored pens and a couple of post it notes and just start playing around. I can’t really tell you what you’re going to need once you get in there with the story. But I bet you’ll be able to figure it out once the materials are in your hands and you start scribbling stuff down. Barratt says, “I know that making one would help my writing, but I just can’t figure out a good way to do it.” I’m not quite sure what you mean. Have you tried making them before and they didn’t work, or you aren’t sure how to start? Everyone I know who uses plotting boards uses them differently. There really is no wrong way. It’s just a tool to help you look at your work in a more visual or graphical manner, like collages. Julie Leto color codes by POV characters, Rachel Vincent writes down all the story elements she wants in her book, arranges them by color, and then figures out what order they should go in, I write each scene, then analyze each by color code to see if my plot has been properly integrated… my friend CL Wilson does hers on computer, using a program called Writer’s Blocks. The above link to Julie Leto sends you to her awesome plotting workshop,which I think will work at any level. The way I do it, I’ve already got a basic idea of the plot progression, and have actually written the scenes, so the following instructions may not be as helpful if you haven’t started writing yet. (I do most of my planning free-form.) Maybe, to make a sample, you might try making a plotting board for a book or movie you already know and love. I recently made one for a workshop I gave on Pride & Prejudice, and I thought it turned out great, and taught me even more about the book and about good subplots. USING A PLOTTING BOARD (Diana): 1. Figure out the basic storyline of your novel. If you have ideas for certain scenes, great! If not, try to get just the basic turning points, the climax, stuff like that. 2. Write a synopsis. Assign a color of post-it note to each plotline or subplotline you think will be a big deal in your novel. 3. Start writing. 4. After you have written a scene, go back and quickly write down what happens in the scene on the corresponding subplot color, for each plot/subplot that is dealt with in that scene. This should only take a moment or two (you don’t want to lose your momentum!) For instance, if you are plot-boarding Pride and Prejudice, and recapping the scene where Lizzie first meets Mr. Darcy at the dance, you might write down on a pink note (pink=love story between Mr. Darcy and Lizzie): “Darcy refuses to dance with Elizabeth and ridicules her within earshot; she laughs it off, surprising him.” Then you might write down on a green note (green=Bingley and Jane’s romance): “Bingley is immediately taken with Jane; dances with her twice.” Try to limit your use of post-its to those that are really developed in the scene. If we get a bit of important info, or something happens that puts the progression of that storyline in a different place, note it. Otherwise, skip it. Just because Lydia is there that night doesn’t mean her plot line gets very far. Wickham hasn’t even moved to town yet! 5. Divide your posterboard into squares, one for each scene of the novel. Place the notes of various colors inside the appropriate squares. Some squares will have more colors than others. That’s okay. In fact, it’s great! If a square has only one color, however, it should be a short scene, or it should be a very important moment within that subplot (when Mr. Darcy meets Lizzie at Pemberley, there’s only one thing going on. But it’s a big enough deal to stand on its own, for it’s Darcy’s moment to prove he’s changed his tune.) 6. If you can’t figure out what color/s a scene should be described in, ask yourself if the scene is really moving the story forward. How and why are important questions to ask here. Maybe it is, but you haven’t assigned a color to that subplot. That’s okay. Get another color (if you run out of post its, use colored pens to differentiate). For instance, maybe you didn’t think to assign a post-it note color to Mr. Collins. 7. As you are writing, you may realize that a subplot you thought would be important is turning out to not be a big part of the story (who cares what becomes of Kitty?) whereas some other thing starts to make up an important part of the story (that nice soldier Wickham who befriends Lizzie). This is also okay. Subplots don’t need to start and end at the same time. 8. As you are plot-boarding each scene, keep an eye on the entire board. If it helps, stand back from time to time and squint, until you can just see the colors. Is there any place on the board where there is a dearth of a particular color? Once a color appears, does it show up regularly until that storyline has reached a conclusion? You’re going to see a few gaps, and that’s just fine. But the more important a plot line is to the story, the fewer the gaps should be. 9. Go back to the scene where gaps are showing. Is there any way you can punch it up a notch, re-integrate the part that’s missing? That’s how I do it. It may work for you, it may not. Maybe Rachel or Julie’s method works better for you. Maybe none of them work for you, but a combo of all three works just dandy. But it’s one of those things where you won’t really know until you try. How did I get started? I sat down with my plotting board and went: “I need to make sure I am keeping all the subplot balls in the air” and away I went. Good luck! |
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