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Rabia Gale

alchemical fantasy

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using index cards to structure your novel

Line-editing comes easily to me. I can spend hours tweaking sentences, polishing description, making dialog snappier. All of which is akin to lovingly smoothing on the wallpaper while the roof leaks, the furnace belches carbon monoxide and a colony of rabid bats has taken residence in the attic. It’s harder to see the overall arc of my story, the structure of my novel, which was one of the reasons why I signed up for How To Revise Your Novel. I wanted to learn how to find and fix my big problems before I spent hours deciding which shade of off-white to paint the walls (Old Linen or Cream Yellow?), only to discover that the walls need to be knocked out so that the kitchen could be enlarged.

And one of the lovely little tricks I learned from HTRYN is writing one-line descriptions of my scenes on index cards. And now I have both a visual representation of my novel and the flexibility to try new structures by moving my scene cards around.

This was the study floor a while ago (I couldn’t leave  my cards down  for too long since I have three kids whose passage is heralded by gale-force (ha! note pun) winds):

I laid out my cards in chronological order, but also in three columns each representing a plot thread (innovatively called Main Plot, Subplot A and Subplot B). This way I could see where my main plot was stretched thin, when there was overlap, where there was too large a cluster of scenes that only dealt with one subplot. To see my novel like this was a huge help to me. I can lay out my novel in so many different ways using colored scene cards–based on POV, location, subplots, the presence of certain characters.

For further reading:

Holly Lisle’ has a workshop for using index cards to come up with a plot in the first place. More on plotting using index cards here and here.

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Filed Under: writing process

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Comments

  1. Jo A says

    June 1, 2010 at 6:15 am

    Oh wow! That looks very complicated, but I can see how it would be a great help 🙂

    Reply
  2. Megs - Scattered Bits says

    June 1, 2010 at 10:19 am

    I still haven’t gotten near far enough in that process, but I’m finally getting somewhere with my writing funk by focusing on the pieces instead of the whole stories that aren’t working.

    Sunday, I pulled out my neon index cards (so much for revising!) and made orange: characters, green: settings, pink: theme, blank unruled white: headers, and yellow: story ideas/moments/scenes/plot points/whatever you want to call it. I wrote down only things I WANTED to write and discovered such a hodgepodge mashup of everything I’ve been TRYING to write and at least one lovely character I’ve been working with as a main that NEVER showed up at all! No wonder my brain’s been messed up.

    I’ve never done this before and for the first time in a while, I feel legitimately inspired. Let’s see how long it lasts…

    Reply
  3. Megs - Scattered Bits says

    June 1, 2010 at 10:19 am

    So all that was to say: Go you and your index cards! :sheepish grin:

    Reply
  4. Rabia says

    June 1, 2010 at 12:50 pm

    Megs, Yay, that you found a way to break out of the story doldrums with the index cards. I’ll have to try color coding for different story elements for the next novel I plan. 😀

    Reply

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