Tuesday 30^th June 2020

I’m outlining again. I am the king of outlines at the moment.

Hopefully it’ll mean this one won’t take too long.

This one’s a little different in that it’s basically splicing together two drafts, the first half from one draft, the second from another. Of course, it’s not quite that easy. The story has to flow seamlessly and there’s further changes to be made.

But for those following along from home… here’s what I’m doing.

I work in Scrivener, and for outlines, I very much work in the corkboard view. So I’ve created a brand new blank document and then proceeded to open each of the drafts I’m ‘stealing from’ and drag the relevant cards across.

I thought it might only bring the corkboard card but it’s brought the entire scene including the text as well. That’s an added bonus.

I’ve then created labels for each of the drafts and applied them to the cards on the corkboard so I can clearly see what’s been taken from what draft.

I’m very conscious of wordcount on this draft. There’s a lot extra items I have to fit in, and I’m worried that will inflate the wordcount.

So imagine my shock when I looked at the stats to get an idea of my current ballpark from combining these two drafts and found it sitting at around a quarter of a million words. I know that one of these drafts came in around 170k words but I thought both of these were around 100k – 120k each.

A little frantic searching around Scrivener and I found the culprit – somehow in dragging cards across, it’s nested a copy of the subsequent chapter. Luckily it was a quick job to go through and remove these and now the wordcount is back to around 120k.

That’s probably 20k more than I’d like it at this stage but it’s workable.

In discussing this new draft, it’s very clear the novel has 3 acts. The plan is to dovetail protagonist and antagonist motivation into these acts. So my next job is to stick a big placeholder card in to denote where these act changes are. I obviously need to think about events in the novel and ensure that they are driven by these rather than having those motivations change at random just because we are in that part of the novel.

I’ve also got a subplot I need to work in. I’ve got to be clever here and somehow combine it with existing scenes.

For now the corkboard is looking very clean with the first half in blue, and the latter in red. That’s going to get more messy over the coming days as I dive in a little deeper.