Well, obviously, the once-a-week plan fell apart. What it came down to is that as I got to the end of each week, I realized I didn’t really have anything useful to say. I guess part of this effort was supposed to be journaling what happened, but weeks of “I didn’t really get much done.” Or “I finished a scene!” seemed boring or narcissistic or both, so I haven’t written a post.
This week, however (well, last week, I guess. My last four or five Saturdays have been filled with trying to get a set of old metal patio furniture stripped and repainted, so my opportunities for progress have been limited), I finished up going through most of the process laid out in the book Blueprinting Your Bestseller, by Stuart Horwitz.
I say “most” because I had already gone through several iterations of thinking through my story and while I hadn’t done anything as formal as what is laid out in BYB, I had already addressed some of the issues that the BYB process is designed to highlight. For example, when it suggested cutting scenes that don’t really match up to your theme, I had already planned on cutting a couple of scenes that would probably have been flagged in that step.
One early problem I had, and this is me not having had a lot of outside feedback on how to talk about the narrative components of writing, was how BYB defines “scene.” When I first went through the process of identifying my scenes with what I thought was the book’s definition, I ended up with almost 200 scenes. A number that seemed a bit unwieldy, in light of later steps in the process where you are having to track story threads (“scenes”) through every scene and another step where you place cards representing each scene physically on a target.
This led me to step back a bit and decide that, outside of needing to communicate with someone else about any of it, I should be using the definition of scene that seems to be the most helpful for analyzing the story. This led me first to the definition of a scene as a portion of the story that has an arc. Thus, a scene should have some setup, it should then build toward a climax and then there should be some aftermath. This seemed to work pretty well for most scenes, but there were a few conversation-heavy scenes that I felt like were separate scenes but didn’t really seem to have an arc (maybe I just haven’t trained my literary eye enough yet, or maybe I’m writing bad conversation scenes :). So, for conversation scenes, I defined them as a portion of the story where characters come together, each hoping to achieve some (likely contradictory) goal, the goals are denied and then there is some reflection. Those two definitions taken together got me to 70 scenes, which seemed a lot more workable.
All of the above made me wish I had been in a class taught by Horwitz where I could show him something I was considering a scene in my book and ask, “is this what you are meaning?”, but I think I got to a useful place nonetheless.
The process of identifying series and then working those into a short blurb about the story and then ultimately into a single sentence theme was probably the most interesting steps and something I spun on for a while. I had always had in mind that the story had an intertwining of a search for community and then being a protector of that community, but it hadn’t been anything formal and I know there were times where the characters had muddied the message. Now that I’ve formally identified something I like as a theme, I know I’ll be able to do a better job keeping things aligned with that as I move through the next revision.
Overall, I would say the experience was very positive and I plan on going through a lot of the BYB steps when I swing back to start the first revision of my second book. The second book is in that first draft state that BYB expects, so I’m sure I will get even more value out of the process than I did this time.