by  J’Roo 

This always happens.

I fully intended to post this during NaNoWriMo, but . . . somewhere in the shuffle, I forgot about it until last week . . . and then it was Christmas. So here I am a couple of days after Christmas posting something I intended to post on November 7th.

Anyway.

I had to put my current novel on hold for NaNoWriMo because I simply couldn’t think too much about it and do 26 stories at the same time. But someone posted a link to a video on YouTube that distracted me for several hours during NaNoWriMo, and may have directly contributed to the fact that the story I wrote on November 7th (“G Is for Gravesite”) was the shortest (finished) story of the bunch.

This is the video. I created a playlist of all five parts. It’s Dan Wells‘ presentation at BYU’s Life, the Universe, and Everything writing symposium on February 13, 2010. It is his seven-point outlining scheme.

(For some reason, WordPress refuses to let me embed a playlist. I’m working on it. For now, this is the first of the five videos.)

So I watched this, and was pretty much overcome with the desire to use this to figure out exactly what the plot(s) is(are) for my novel Perdition’s Flames. Not to mention the other novels in the same series. Maybe if I can figure out the seven points of the first one, I can come up with the seven points of others, as well.

It came as quite a surprise to me when I sat down to actually do this that I already knew exactly what each of the seven points was going to be for the plot of the novel. Not so much for subplots and character arcs. Those I still need to work on.

This always happens. I find yet another reason to stop writing and start over. I think perhaps what I’ll do instead is to continue writing and use this for the rewrite. There are only a few more scenes, really, and I already know what has to happen in them. I don’t have any subplots, and two of my characters have kind of disappeared, but hey. That’s what rewrites are for, right? :)

I keep searching for useful tools to help me plot and plan. Truth is, it’s all in my head, but every time I try to put it on paper (figuratively or literally), I end up frustrated. One of these days I’m going to find a useful tool, dammit! :)