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Thanks, Penpilot, I did indeed read your articles when you published them.
I think perhaps I've done a bad job of explaining my actual problem, but I appreciate hearing how you all use cards.
Not sure if anyone cares to delve deeper into my issue, especially since my friend told me exactly what I was missing, but if it might help give you guys a better insight so you could suggest ways I might in the future overcome my own problems, I guess that's worth a shot.
I've written a first draft, but plan to change the book significantly during this rewrite. I started by backing up in time and opening in a new place, several months before the initial opening (which is now in chapter 3).
I have a "Beginning", where my MC is playing cards at her benefactor's birthday party. I feel pretty happy with how I introduce her, the setting, the immediate circumstances, and the greater themes of the book (family, lies, and freedom). From there, I moved onto a "Set-up" part, where I transitioned from my MC thinking about her goal (to leave her benefactor and the society of the crime syndicate), and take actual physical steps toward getting ready to part ways. Basically, she built on what actions she took in the first chapter.
The next chapter is the "Inciting Incident". It falls pretty far into the story, which concerns me, but percentage-wise, if I keep it where it is, I'm writing a 200k word book rather than the 95k words I initially wrote, and since I'm adding chapters in that span 7k-10k...well, that actually sounds about right. So, anyways, chapter three begins with a conversation not unlike the one that opens The Lies of Locke Lamora, where one man goes to meet another, and just after they start talking, he says, "Have I got a story for you!" and then we go through a series of split scenes, where I show a scene in another location, then come back to the two guys talking, advancing their conversation for a couple pages, and then jump to another split scene that's progressing the magnitude of the event he's telling the story about. (Sorry that's so confusing). I guess I'm trying to say that the inciting incident is a chapter long and it's not told from my MC POV, but is shown through these other PsOV that will never be used again.
Chapter four is what I'm working on now, and I'll come back to this in a moment...
I searched out where the Climax of Act 1 falls in my story, and it's clearly the point where my MC gets taken captive and interrogated in a series of subsequently more desperate and more abusive scenes (three in total). That HAS to be the climax, because the guy she hates, who defied logic and tried to keep her from getting kidnapped, got kidnapped with her, and after they were left together, bleeding on the floor, he makes a really difficult personal choice that will haunt him for chapters, and the two of them escape their captors.
I'm going to stop telling you my outline stuff there, because that's where the pertinent info sort of stops, on this subject.
Now, between the Inciting Incident in Ch 3, and the Act 1 Climax in Ch 7, I have three chapters. They all have a purpose. I know what happens in each one. Here's that info, so I can try to keep you all with me and not lose you in explaining.
Chapter four is where the MC experiences a terrible shock and a sort of magic/ spiritual crisis. She thinks she has a magic power, but something goes awry, and she's reminded of a time it happened before, a fluke, and she almost died in a "dream". This experience begins her self-doubt pertaining to her skill/ power. She goes home and gets called a cursed freak by her best friend, and then finds out that while everyone was out searching for her all night, some bodies in the field where she woke...were her crime boss' men. Next, I cut over to me secondary POV character, who is trying to have a curse of his own removed.
IN Chapter five, my MC patches things up with her frightened friend. It's a holiday party in the manor, and the MC is a con artist, so of course she has a plan already underway, even before the city's crime bosses get to business. I show humor, tactics, and conflict during the business, and later as the MC's nemesis upstages her. I end with bad news, the nemesis is moving into the house, joining their extended crime family.
Chapter six is tricky. At the party, a rival don's agent gets overzealous about the business at hand. IN chapter six, my MC is tasked with eliminating him. This is the main conflict of the beginning of the story. She loves being rich and powerful, but she hates her job and the fact that sometimes she has to do things that SHOULD make her feel bad (I'm still unclear how to play this. Is she sick when she kills this man? Does she see him as a necessary sacrifice and therefore is neutral to the fact that he had to die? Is she secretly scared that she enjoys how powerful it makes her feel to kill someone? Does she feel scared like she might be caught? Or is she almost haughty or even disgusted that she's so good at her job? So many questions about how to squeeze the most tension out without being greedy and ruining my plot). Anyways, so she kills this guy (poison), runs across town to give herself a solid alibi (the guy's boss), and then ends up digging information out of the boss, who she drugged to make sleepy. When she goes home to her own boss, I want to get to the initial reaction to the murder, her first personal thoughts on how she feels about her job. Then, just after that, the nemesis causes a conflict with the MC, and at the end of it, he shames her thoroughly, which ends the chapter.
Next chapter is the Party.
So, in that pan of three chapters, I didn't know what to put in. I tried note cards, but basically, what I could fit on the note cards was pretty much what I just wrote for you all. So...why even use cards? I was trying to use them to establish what I NEEDED to put into those three chapters that would carry the story forward.
What I ended up with was emailing a good friend who is a freaking genius as a plotter and just all around a cooler head than I am, and I told her, "This is what I have, this is where I'm going...so what's missing in between?"
And she gave me some great answers. I told her I was at the "Second Thoughts" portion of a Three-Act Structure. The point where a decision must be made...but I had three chapters, so...where do I put it, and WTF am I going to do with these three important chapters that mean a lot to my story, and I can't cut them...
And that's when she said to do the flip-flop between, "This is my home and I have money and power and everything I always wanted...but the price is feeling pretty steep. I need to leave and find my own freedom. But freedom is kinda scary, because then I'm alone and don't have a lot of means of supporting myself. I could stay...leaving is going to cost me everything I worked for. Everything I killed men for. It would be stupid to throw all that away, as if calling my whole life's effort a waste. But is my freedom really a waste? Don't I want that more than anything? More than killing a man with poison in an alley? Which I have feelings about..." So, now that my friend told me that "second thoughts" don't have to be resolved quickly or in a single scene...I'm feeling so much more "permitted" to just keep the scenes I have planned, but use each to present a sort of supporting statement to one side or the other (Go/ Stay).
But, going back to the cards...i'm not sure what I'd actually write on the cards, since I already feel like I see note cards as outlining tools, I suppose. A way to reorder the events of the story you want to tell. But I've always found them rather limiting because once they're written on...you use them or throw them out, and I've just never functioned well with the small bits of info I could fit on the card. I tend to jump right from an outline like what I just wrote for you guys, right into a full first draft (that recently I admitted is my detailed outline).
So...I did try to use cards to fix this issue, before asking for help, I wanted to sort myself out. But I just got stuck on the cards. It looks like most of you are confirming exactly what I experienced, cards are for initial outlining and summarizing intricate scenes into summaries so that you can slide them around and create a building story.
I just guess it can't help me in this case, because I already know what happens, and I know in what order. I just got stuck on what part of the story I was telling, whether I was even moving the story forward, and what to do to keep vaguely true to a proper Three-Act Structure.
Thanks for sharing! I'm totally using cards to plot.
I think perhaps I've done a bad job of explaining my actual problem, but I appreciate hearing how you all use cards.
Not sure if anyone cares to delve deeper into my issue, especially since my friend told me exactly what I was missing, but if it might help give you guys a better insight so you could suggest ways I might in the future overcome my own problems, I guess that's worth a shot.
I've written a first draft, but plan to change the book significantly during this rewrite. I started by backing up in time and opening in a new place, several months before the initial opening (which is now in chapter 3).
I have a "Beginning", where my MC is playing cards at her benefactor's birthday party. I feel pretty happy with how I introduce her, the setting, the immediate circumstances, and the greater themes of the book (family, lies, and freedom). From there, I moved onto a "Set-up" part, where I transitioned from my MC thinking about her goal (to leave her benefactor and the society of the crime syndicate), and take actual physical steps toward getting ready to part ways. Basically, she built on what actions she took in the first chapter.
The next chapter is the "Inciting Incident". It falls pretty far into the story, which concerns me, but percentage-wise, if I keep it where it is, I'm writing a 200k word book rather than the 95k words I initially wrote, and since I'm adding chapters in that span 7k-10k...well, that actually sounds about right. So, anyways, chapter three begins with a conversation not unlike the one that opens The Lies of Locke Lamora, where one man goes to meet another, and just after they start talking, he says, "Have I got a story for you!" and then we go through a series of split scenes, where I show a scene in another location, then come back to the two guys talking, advancing their conversation for a couple pages, and then jump to another split scene that's progressing the magnitude of the event he's telling the story about. (Sorry that's so confusing). I guess I'm trying to say that the inciting incident is a chapter long and it's not told from my MC POV, but is shown through these other PsOV that will never be used again.
Chapter four is what I'm working on now, and I'll come back to this in a moment...
I searched out where the Climax of Act 1 falls in my story, and it's clearly the point where my MC gets taken captive and interrogated in a series of subsequently more desperate and more abusive scenes (three in total). That HAS to be the climax, because the guy she hates, who defied logic and tried to keep her from getting kidnapped, got kidnapped with her, and after they were left together, bleeding on the floor, he makes a really difficult personal choice that will haunt him for chapters, and the two of them escape their captors.
I'm going to stop telling you my outline stuff there, because that's where the pertinent info sort of stops, on this subject.
Now, between the Inciting Incident in Ch 3, and the Act 1 Climax in Ch 7, I have three chapters. They all have a purpose. I know what happens in each one. Here's that info, so I can try to keep you all with me and not lose you in explaining.
Chapter four is where the MC experiences a terrible shock and a sort of magic/ spiritual crisis. She thinks she has a magic power, but something goes awry, and she's reminded of a time it happened before, a fluke, and she almost died in a "dream". This experience begins her self-doubt pertaining to her skill/ power. She goes home and gets called a cursed freak by her best friend, and then finds out that while everyone was out searching for her all night, some bodies in the field where she woke...were her crime boss' men. Next, I cut over to me secondary POV character, who is trying to have a curse of his own removed.
IN Chapter five, my MC patches things up with her frightened friend. It's a holiday party in the manor, and the MC is a con artist, so of course she has a plan already underway, even before the city's crime bosses get to business. I show humor, tactics, and conflict during the business, and later as the MC's nemesis upstages her. I end with bad news, the nemesis is moving into the house, joining their extended crime family.
Chapter six is tricky. At the party, a rival don's agent gets overzealous about the business at hand. IN chapter six, my MC is tasked with eliminating him. This is the main conflict of the beginning of the story. She loves being rich and powerful, but she hates her job and the fact that sometimes she has to do things that SHOULD make her feel bad (I'm still unclear how to play this. Is she sick when she kills this man? Does she see him as a necessary sacrifice and therefore is neutral to the fact that he had to die? Is she secretly scared that she enjoys how powerful it makes her feel to kill someone? Does she feel scared like she might be caught? Or is she almost haughty or even disgusted that she's so good at her job? So many questions about how to squeeze the most tension out without being greedy and ruining my plot). Anyways, so she kills this guy (poison), runs across town to give herself a solid alibi (the guy's boss), and then ends up digging information out of the boss, who she drugged to make sleepy. When she goes home to her own boss, I want to get to the initial reaction to the murder, her first personal thoughts on how she feels about her job. Then, just after that, the nemesis causes a conflict with the MC, and at the end of it, he shames her thoroughly, which ends the chapter.
Next chapter is the Party.
So, in that pan of three chapters, I didn't know what to put in. I tried note cards, but basically, what I could fit on the note cards was pretty much what I just wrote for you all. So...why even use cards? I was trying to use them to establish what I NEEDED to put into those three chapters that would carry the story forward.
What I ended up with was emailing a good friend who is a freaking genius as a plotter and just all around a cooler head than I am, and I told her, "This is what I have, this is where I'm going...so what's missing in between?"
And she gave me some great answers. I told her I was at the "Second Thoughts" portion of a Three-Act Structure. The point where a decision must be made...but I had three chapters, so...where do I put it, and WTF am I going to do with these three important chapters that mean a lot to my story, and I can't cut them...
And that's when she said to do the flip-flop between, "This is my home and I have money and power and everything I always wanted...but the price is feeling pretty steep. I need to leave and find my own freedom. But freedom is kinda scary, because then I'm alone and don't have a lot of means of supporting myself. I could stay...leaving is going to cost me everything I worked for. Everything I killed men for. It would be stupid to throw all that away, as if calling my whole life's effort a waste. But is my freedom really a waste? Don't I want that more than anything? More than killing a man with poison in an alley? Which I have feelings about..." So, now that my friend told me that "second thoughts" don't have to be resolved quickly or in a single scene...I'm feeling so much more "permitted" to just keep the scenes I have planned, but use each to present a sort of supporting statement to one side or the other (Go/ Stay).
But, going back to the cards...i'm not sure what I'd actually write on the cards, since I already feel like I see note cards as outlining tools, I suppose. A way to reorder the events of the story you want to tell. But I've always found them rather limiting because once they're written on...you use them or throw them out, and I've just never functioned well with the small bits of info I could fit on the card. I tend to jump right from an outline like what I just wrote for you guys, right into a full first draft (that recently I admitted is my detailed outline).
So...I did try to use cards to fix this issue, before asking for help, I wanted to sort myself out. But I just got stuck on the cards. It looks like most of you are confirming exactly what I experienced, cards are for initial outlining and summarizing intricate scenes into summaries so that you can slide them around and create a building story.
I just guess it can't help me in this case, because I already know what happens, and I know in what order. I just got stuck on what part of the story I was telling, whether I was even moving the story forward, and what to do to keep vaguely true to a proper Three-Act Structure.
Thanks for sharing! I'm totally using cards to plot.
