Beating the drum
September has gone and it won’t be long before NaNoWriMo opens its doors for this year’s participants.
This weekend I’m gearing up to taking the next step in the planning of my Safari Supper novel.
My story arc offers me an outline of the chapters – assuming I decide to present my story in chronological order. I’ll certainly aim to write it in that order – and decide later precisely how it might best appear in the final book.
To remind myself about the concept of ‘beats’ I watched again Lecture 7 of the Udemy course ‘How to Plan and Outline Novels (Using Scrivener)‘. This lesson is entitled ‘Story Construction and Writing the Beats’.
Beats are about flow.
Like musical notes in a score, they play a tune – hopefully, one which sounds good to my reader – and I am both composer and conductor.
The arrangement of the beats creates the rhythm. Beat 1 can have three components: a goal, some conflict and then a disaster. This can be followed by Beat 2 with a reaction, a dilemma, and some decision.
This pair of beats can be repeated: dum-do dum-di
Dum-di dum-di dum-di da!
The da beat might be a flashback.
Transforming this story arc into a series of beats is the plan for this weekend.
What’s your plan?
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Patsy
2 October 2015 at 18:07In the past I’ve spent far too long wondering which parts of the story should go where rather than writing down those parts. Making that decision later sounds like an excellent idea.
anne.rainbow@btinternet.com
2 October 2015 at 19:02That’s the joy of using Scrivener. Each scene is a discrete piece of the jigsaw and you can colour code e.g. for them/ characters involved. Then, later, you can easily rearrange using the corkboard feature.
Writing in chronological order makes sense – and you are less likely to make continuity errors? During the edit, you can bring a scene forward and consider how to introduce backstory using flashbacks, that kind of thing. Main thing is to get the action written!