Write Your Novel Step by Step (9)

Your Inspired Plot
In Step 8 you made a list of all the new material you’ve created that you’d like to include in your novel to fill holes and fix inconsistencies.  In this step, you’ll weave those concepts into your existing synopsis to fashion an all-inclusive and enriched version.
The first thing to do is re-read your synopsis from Step 5 to re-familiarize yourself with your novel as you originally saw it.  Then, look over your list of the new story elements to be added to the mix.
Begin with the notion you’d most enjoy seeing in your story and, scanning your synopsis from top to bottom, locate the best place or places to insert it so that it will seamlessly integrate into your existing material.  When you know where it is going to show up, re-write just that section (or sections) of your synopsis to include it.
After each inclusion of new material, scan over the rest of your synopsis to see if the changes conflict with any other sections.  If so, make any additional alterations required to resolve those conflicts.
Repeat this process for all the concepts you wish to weave into your evolving story.  Some new material may slip right in.  Other times you may have to scratch your head a bit to see how you can wedge it in there.  At times, you may have to reword a section you’ve already rewritten to add another concept or two in the same place.
Don’t spend too much time on your exact wording.  This isn’t the time to be literary.  That will happen in the next step when we wrap up the Inspiration: Plot section so we can move into Inspiration: Characters.
If there are some things you just can’t find a home for, fret not, for that just indicates they probably don’t belong in the same story with all the others.
When you have woven in as many of your new ideas as you can (again, within reason, without head-busting, face palms or the gnashing of teeth) move on to Step 10 so we can wrap up inspiration for your plot and get on with your characters!
Excerpted from the book, Write Your Novel Step by Step

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tannin Sensitivity (Sensitivity to Tannins)

Here's the ungarnished truth about tannins and tannin sensitivity. As you probably know, tannins are astringent polymers that naturally occur in coffee, tea, red wine and chocolate (among the most popular dietary sources). Effects of Tannins: Tannins may cause migraines, joint pain that mimics artheritis, tiredness, depression, bowel problems, problems with vision when focussing, digestion problems, thin brittle skin, perhaps hair loss and slow hair growth, and myriad other symptoms, both subtle and severe. For years I suffered a series of symptoms that I had pinned on coffee, uncertain about tea, and pretty sure were tied to red wine - no problem with chocolate. These symptoms were such diverse elements as - lethargy, tiredness, depression, joint pain in hips, shoulders and fingers, thin brittle skin, hair loss, slowed hair growth, slowed metabolism and even acid reflux and heartburn and diminished ability to focus closely, requiring reading glasses. I tried experim
Read more

What is Mental Relativity?

Mental Relativity is a new model of psychology that grew out of the development of the Dramatica Theory of Story. Dramatica's central concept is called the Story Mind. According to the theory, every story has a mind of its own - the structure represents the mind's psychology and the storytelling develops its personality. The Dramatica theory was used to create a computer model of the Story Mind, which was patented and became the core "Story Engine" of a software product, also called Dramatica, which is the best selling story development tool in the world. The Story Engine is actually able to predict a psychological structure for a story based on an author's answers to questions about his or her dramatic intent. It wasn't long before it was discovered that this same Story Mind model was also able to predict the psychologies of real people in addition to characters. In further exploring this unexpected outgrowth of the theory, we discovered that the model was
Read more

The War Between Creativity and Structure

Image
Perhaps the greatest hurdle in writing is the attempt to bring structure to a story without putting your Muse in a straight jacket. Often structure is brought into the picture too soon, clamping your passion into an iron maiden that pierces it more deeply with every turn of a structural screw until it bleeds out entirely. In contrast, writing with purposeless abandon creates a jellyfish of a story: an amorphous blob of subject matter with no spine, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The  Master Storyteller Method  was designed to bring passion and structure together seamlessly, at the right place and the right time in the story development process. When first starting to write, our ideas usually come fast and furious. Many of them are little snippets: a notion for a line of dialog, a location in which some action will take place, the basic concept for a character, or perhaps a plot twist. Sometimes, we begin with no more than a period of history or a topic or an et
Read more