Wynnara
Minstrel
I thought people might get a kick out of this. I know it gets a few raised eyebrows when visitors come into my home office.
This is my five book series laid out on my wall in post-it notes. It's a method I kind of made up but I suspect it's influenced by my interest in animation and the way storyboard panels are often laid out on the wall during the writing process.
I'm very much a visual person and I like having a plan laid out large so I can move around it without having to flip pages. Each colour represents one of the major characters. Read horizontally you get the journey of one character through the novel and the entire series. Read each column vertically and you effectively get the plot... what each of the characters is doing or thinking at an approximate moment in time. There will be some overlap in terms of action--eg. two characters sharing the same space might have similar actions, but each character will have their own reaction to the events.
What I found by doing this... focusing almost entirely on what the characters are thinking and feeling... is that the plot kind of fell out naturally from how they reacted to what was going on.
Anyways, I'm curious to know if others plan their stories this obsessively or if you find your progress more fluid?
Oh, and Books 2-5 aren't actually shorter than Book 1, I just... err, ran out of wall space.
This is my five book series laid out on my wall in post-it notes. It's a method I kind of made up but I suspect it's influenced by my interest in animation and the way storyboard panels are often laid out on the wall during the writing process.
I'm very much a visual person and I like having a plan laid out large so I can move around it without having to flip pages. Each colour represents one of the major characters. Read horizontally you get the journey of one character through the novel and the entire series. Read each column vertically and you effectively get the plot... what each of the characters is doing or thinking at an approximate moment in time. There will be some overlap in terms of action--eg. two characters sharing the same space might have similar actions, but each character will have their own reaction to the events.
What I found by doing this... focusing almost entirely on what the characters are thinking and feeling... is that the plot kind of fell out naturally from how they reacted to what was going on.
Anyways, I'm curious to know if others plan their stories this obsessively or if you find your progress more fluid?
Oh, and Books 2-5 aren't actually shorter than Book 1, I just... err, ran out of wall space.