While everyone else is carving pumpkins and hunting for a black turtle neck and New Balance sneakers, in between desperately trying to finish my house repairs before freezing temperatures arrive, I’m preparing for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).In the Seattle area, the [...]]]>

Autumn leaves mean NaNoWriMo plot and character development time!

While everyone else is carving pumpkins and hunting for a black turtle neck and New Balance sneakers, in between desperately trying to finish my house repairs before freezing temperatures arrive, I’m preparing for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).In the Seattle area, the NaNoWriMo fans filled not one, but two plot development workshops in a few short hours of registration. So I thought I’d put up some NaNoWriMo Preparation Tips and ideas for those of us who didn’t get to attend.

Plot Development Worksheets

First, let me provide some novel plot and chapter development storyboard worksheets. Click on the title below to download:

Novel Storyboard Worksheet : An open storyboard for making notes about events and characters by chapter

Traditional Plot Storyboard Worksheet : The traditional fiction arc broken down into the standard 20-chapters used by mass market paperbacks for decades.

Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! Storyboard Worksheet : Screenwriter and teacher Blake Snyder’s technique condensed into a storyboard format for plotting today’s high-concept fiction.

Chapter Storyboard Worksheet : Good for breaking a chapter down by scene; especially useful if you use multiple locations and character point of views to keep events in a clear sequence

Character Development and Profiling

Heroes and heroines, even just protagonists and antagonists, can often get fuzzy in the heat of trying to write a novel in a month. So I started using the Target Audience Profile worksheet that I give my marketing students to help them keep their potential customer or client in focus. Try completing the Target Audience Profile Worksheet and writing a profile of your main characters to keep on hand. It helps when trying to answer that magical, musical question “What would this character do now?”

Target Audience Profile Worksheet

Once I have a basic demographic profile of a character, I add things like family background, any key incidence in the characters life like bullying at school or winning a competition that had an impact. I find a lot of times if I’m stuck or blocked in a project, it’s because I haven’t really defined a character (or any of them) well enough to clearly know how he or she would react or respond to the situation.

Visual Techniques for Developing Plot and Characters

A number of writers I’ve met use collage to prepare for their writing projects. Bestselling romantic comedy author Jennifer Crusie has a collection of them now and here (Wild Ride Collage)  and here (this one is more about the process).Basically it’s similar to doing a visualization collage.

Begin by focusing on the title or theme of your story. Next collect images and words from magazines or other media while focusing on your theme or title. You can even collect found objects that seem to fit (I met one author who actually creates sculptures for his writing projects). Once you feel you’ve collected enough stuff to start, grab a large sheet of paper — or a box if you want to go 3-D — and start assembling your images, words, objects as it moves you. Jennifer Crusie and others talk about leaving placeholders for characters or story elements when they feel something is missing and tracking it down later.

Writeoncon.com has a video by author Tera Lynn Childs demonstrating how she makes a character collage here.

I’ve also met authors who draw or paint a scene from their story. I met several who actually create the book covers to inspire them throughout the whole process and keep the mood and another (a screenwriter) who created the movie poster.

My absolute favorite was a writing friend who persuaded a B. Dalton’s employee to give her one of their old bestseller list cards; carefully replaced the number position with her book title and name; and then hung it up in front of her workspace to keep her writing daily. She also created book covers to place in front of her workspace and individual character collages. She didn’t reach #1 before she died, but she did make it on the list.

There’s no right or wrong way to do any of this. There’s just your way. These are all simply a way for authors to use a different part of their brain in solving plot and character development. Give it a try. If nothing else, you’ll have a conversation piece.

The goal is to get to know our characters, get a feel for their story arcs, and inspire us to keep our backsides in our chairs and our fingers on our keyboards until we have our book (or at least 50,000 words and the basic spine of our book).

So NaNoWriMoers, let’s start our engines!

And feel free to share this post with your NaNoWriMo community!

A friend of mine who writes urban fantasy novels turned me on to Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!®  The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need and his technique of developing story plots. I was skeptical at first since I’d gone through a screenwriting phase a few years back and thought I’d [...]]]>

Blake Snyder's Cat series makes it easy to visualize your plot

A friend of mine who writes urban fantasy novels turned me on to Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!®  The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need and his technique of developing story plots. I was skeptical at first since I’d gone through a screenwriting phase a few years back and thought I’d pretty much read and discovered everything there was to developing plot as if writing a screenplay, but I picked up some new techniques and ideas from Mr. Snyder. I’ve added a quick summary worksheet below that you can download to get a feel for the technique.

Starting in the 1980′s the the logline of a script became critical. Used for both pitching a manuscript and selling the movie, the logline is a single line description of the story and an extended or enhanced logline is a 1-2 sentence description of the story with all the critical elements included.  The goal was to creating something that could sell your script in the length of time it took to ride an elevator. By the end of the 80′s, novelists used the them to pitch their manuscripts as well.

Snyder’s basic logline template is composed of the hero (with a descriptive adjective), the antagonist (also with a descriptive adjective) and the hero’s compelling, ironic primal goal written to spark images of possibilities. For example, Die Hard’s logline would be: A bullheaded cop comes to L.A. to visit his estranged wife when her office is taken over by terrorists. The enhanced logline would something like: On the brink of a divorce, a bullheaded, street-wise, New York cop is trapped in his wife’s office building by terrorists and teams up with an L.A. “desk cop” to stop them; but when his taunts of the terrorists risks exposing his hostage wife’s identity, he must learn to adapt and change to outsmart the lead terrorist and prevent the true goal of a billion-dollar heist.

The enhances or extended logline contains all the key story elements. In his Save the Cat!® series, Blake Snyder identifies these as:

At a Stasis=Death moment (if things don’t change, something will end or die), a flawed Protagonist (the flaw proving an obstacle to the resolution) has a Catalyst (something that happens to change the situation) and Breaks into Act Two with the B Story (the subplot or underlying foundation of the situation); however, when the Midpoint (pivotal event or crisis) happens, the protagonist MUST learn the Theme Stated (whatever is the underlying theme of the story) before All is Lost (the antagonist wins) to the flawed Antagonist (the flaw being the cause of the antagonist’s defeat).

Being a screenwriter, Blake Snyder thinks in images and he breaks things down that way starting with the Opening Image and ending his story plot development board with the Final Image. He also provides a series of questions to help us develop and revise our characters and plots. For my novelist friend, who is considerably younger than I am and grew up in the much more visual world of anime, manga and video, the Save the Cat!® approach was much clearer than the Traditional Fiction Writing Story Arc or even John Truby’s 22 Building Blocks approach.

I found his second book in the Save the Cat!®  series, where Snyder does a break down of several well-known and successful movies, so useful in actually seeing his technique in action I purchased the third book in the series (which offers additional tips to avoid common problems and pitfalls). Blake Snyder has also produced a software program for screenwriting that helps you develop your loglines and storyboard your plot with the ability to create and shuffle the necessary scenes for your manuscript.

A Plot Development Storyboard Worksheet for You

Since I don’t do screenwriting any more, I decided to make another worksheet that I could use with my manuscripts to remind me of Snyder’s key concepts. You can download it here:

Blake Snyder Storyboard Concepts Worksheet

Be sure to check out Blake Snyder’s website to download his various worksheets, tip sheets and tools for things like his 15 story beats, writing comedy and writing horror. You can also get a schedule of his upcoming classes and workshops which includes not only his Screenwriting Beat Sheet Workshop but his Novel Writing Beat Sheet Workshop. All of which are far better than using my Cliff Note’s worksheet.