Last year I found Diana Peterfreund’s excellent blog post about using a plotting board, and I tried it for my novel. This method captures the novel’s plot points on Post-It notes that you rearrange on a big white poster board or, in my case, a three-panel science fair display board that I can fold up to protect the fluttering bits of paper from my very interested cats.

I admire her discipline and her vision. For me, it didn’t work completely, although it was a greater success than the Snowflake Method was.

The good thing about my plotting board is that it gives me a 30,000-foot overview of my book, letting me more clearly see the plots, subplots, chapters, and scenes. The bad thing is that — when I look at it too often — my writing feels formulaic. I feel tied to a particular path and miss the “Oooh-oooh-oooh, look what I found!” moments of excitement that I get from just sitting down, writing, and seeing what happens.

What seems to work for me is to do the plotting board and then ignore it until I get stuck in my writing and need a mental jump start. The simple act of thinking about my plot down to this granular level of detail gives me a fuzzy idea of where I’m going. And ignoring it like a map in the glove compartment (until I feel lost) seems to give me the freedom I need to enjoy writing.

What works for you?

Technorati Tags: pantser, plotter, novel plotting, novel overview, Diana Peterfreund, fiction writing, plotting board

Some writers seem to enjoy the process of discovering their novels as they go along, rather than plotting it to pieces. Diana Abu-Jaber is one such author. On the 8/14/07 podcast of Writers on Writing, Diana quoted another writer about letting go of the death-grip on the creative process and just seeing where your imagination takes you. Cool. So today’s quote of the week is:

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
~ Andre Gide

I’m not sure where I fall on the plotter/seat-of-the-pantser continuum. I guess I’m still exploring.

Technorati Tags: Plotting, pantser

Yesterday was kind of skimpy on the word count, but today was back up to snuff. The total for yesterday and today is 2,531 words. (I’d been hoping for 4,000, but right now with my part-time writing, around 2K seems to be my magic number.) I’m just tickled to have a cool new plot element that I’m starting to work into the background of several scenes. If it works out like I hope, it will make the reader think sympathetically about a certain character on the first read of the book; on the second, once the dead man’s secret is uncovered, it should give them chills.

I’m also tossing around different POV strategies. I want the book to be a true mystery. And it definitely won’t be one if I’m inside the killer’s head, in the first several INTENSE scenes I have already written. So I *think* I’m going to use those scenes as just background — confidence builders for me so I’ll know “what really happened” when I write the rest of the book from the protagonist’s point of view. That is, if I can do this all from just one person’s vantage point. Will that be too boring?

Or if I do use that information, I may strip out the killer’s name during the killer’s flashbacks to the death scene, so the reader is left in the dark a little longer, wondering at the killer’s identity and motive.

This is fun, plotting it all out. It’s like picking out pretty clothes when I’ve got plenty of money to buy whatever I want. So … how’s your plotting going?

Technorati Tags: Seventy Days of Sweat, book progress, murder mystery writing, writing challenge, my novel, point of view, plotting