Drawing from the Well
Queries Sent: 1
Total Queries: 18
Rejections: 2
Scenes Arranged…Mapped?: 0
Total Scenes: 251
No scenes yesterday. It was a busy one. Then today was busy too. I’m going to try to knock out a few scenes tonight, but it’s looking grim. I DID get a query out yesterday, though. Now, I’m considering changing my own terminology. “Sceneing” is NOT a real word and that has bothered me. This week, another word bubbled up: mapping. It’s a real word and it’s an accurate representation of what I’m doing: I’m mapping out the scenes that will build this book. I’m still noodling it over, but it might just stick.
Filling the Well
1984: 59%
A Good War: 100%! (Book 18 of 25 for #ProjectBookworm2019)
Bloodwitch: 4%
I made LOTS of progress in the last day and a half. Book 18 down. As expected, it was better than Elegy. The nice thing is that it filled in some motivations that weren’t evident in game. Now to dig into a long, deep novel: Bloodwitch. It’s Book 3 in the Witchlands series by Susan Dennard (who is a lovely source of advice and guidance through her newsletter). I read Sightwitch, Book 2.5 in the same series, earlier this year so I’m interested where Bloodwitch will go now. 1984 is also getting better than I expected. It’s SO interesting. Seriously, go read it.
Polishing the Well
May the Fourth be with you.
My son and I went out to Disney Springs and checked out what was going on out there today to celebrate. There was a little cool stuff, but even better was spending time with my son. Then we came home and watched Episode IV with my wife and relaxed. It was a good day.
Well Chat
Cards Against Insanity
As part of our Tools of the Trade discussion, let’s talk about note cards. It is common to see authors talk about note cards in designing scenes, keeping them straight, and rearranging them through drafting. I even used it when I rebuilt Book One. They’re valuable planning and adjusting tools. I may yet use them in adjusting the chapter order of Book Two since I’m writing scenes and chapters as they come together not necessarily in their final order.
So how do you use note cards? Better yet, how do you make them? There’s no right or wrong way. That’s the good and bad news. It depends on how your brain works as to how you arrange things. To me, there are three ways to do this.
The first is in generalities. You just use key words or short phrases to describe the scene and that is all. Everything from there is increasing the complexity and detail of the card. The advantages of key word note cards are that they are fast to produce, fast to reference, and easy on the eyes. The drawback, of course, is that you don’t have a whole lot of detail to reference if needed.
Next is detailed, handmade note cards. Again, there is flexibility in writing the cards because you can put whatever you want on them. Characters, motivations, storylines, events, everything up to the whole works. The deterrents are that these take longer to make both in that there is increased detail and that you’re putting them together by hand each time. There’s likely no uniformity either.
Lastly, there’s my favorite method: template note cards. It takes some time to set up the template. I use Excel and then copy the template into a Word document as an image and format the document to be the size of the note card I’m using. Then you can print the template directly onto blank note cards (blank = no lines at all on either side in this case). Yeah, giant nerd.
So why do this? Uniform note cards that lead you to every detail you want to capture and remember as you draft serve well when the details are flying fast and furious. The other reason is that you can have FedEx or Kinko’s print as many of these as you need. I recommend having them professionally printed even if you put the template together. The other advantage is that you can design these however you like. The downside here is setup time. It takes time to create the template, time to get the cards printed, time to fill them out. After that, though, you’ve got most of the data you need to write.
Note cards can be a huge boon but there is definitely a cost associated with them in time. And they’re DEFINITELY not for everyone. Pantsers would haaaaaaaaaaaate them. For me, though, they’re a great tool. Check ’em out if you’re curious. I’ve got a template you could borrow. 😉
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG