This blog's title is given new meaning

I mentioned that I was going to talk about writing in my original post on this blog, and I am.

Here is a picture of a plot plotting plot, or in other words a chart on my wall showing the plot lines of a story that I am working on at the moment:


If any of my colleagues think those post it notes look familiar, they do not need to worry. This project is work inspired and hopefully can be tied into the company.

I have three colleagues at work helping me out with this. If I don't produce a chapter a fortnight, I owe them each one Euro. I got some really nice feedback on the preface today, and while talking I mentioned the above wall chart. My colleague was surprised that I was taking such an engineering approach to it. It's true that my work experiences (scrum, agile, and user centred design processes) have an effect on the way I tackle problems, but what I forgot to mention is that experience plays a factor in it too.

I'm already halfway through a novel, one which I was given the original idea for several years ago. I knew that my writing would improve as I aged and practised so I left the original plot of this story brewing for a while, came back to it, paused while moving to Finland, and then reviewed it again. The review brought about some serious editing and I learned a lot from it. I put into practise rules about starting in the middle of the action and cutting out passages that are not exciting enough. I even replaced one character with someone very different, which lead to a reassessment of where the plot would need to go later on according to the personality and subsequrnt decisions of the replacement character.

Now, on my chart, I am putting what I learned into practise, so that I can produce a draught worthy of showing my colleagues. In order from top to bottom: Yellow notes mark the start and end of chapters; Red notes mark general world events (e.g. stock markets crash in Asia); Blue notes mark events based around one organisation; Green notes mark events based around another organisation; The brightly coloured notes underneath are for specific character storylines.

Here's a straight-on picture:


Straight away by doing this I can get an idea of which events occur first for specific characters; for example, travelling may take some time. I can see where there a big gaps with no character activity in them (see that gap in the character notes centre-right?). I can mark the post it notes that contain juicy enough events to write about. I can mark out points where chapters start and end, and this one is really valuable because you can see my whole story, exciting though it is, will probably only come to five chapters.

So straight away I know what to work on. Oh, and now it's a two-part story, and the wall is only showing the first part.


As for the 'original' book, the one that has taught me so much and will still teach me more, I am publishing it on the sister blog to this one:

I Want More

You can read the about section or you can go straight to the preface.


Melody.