March 2, 2020
Share how you keep your characters, storylines, etc., organized. Do you use an outline? Notecards? Post-its all over your walls?
As many of you know, I’m what is called a pantser. I don’t plot out my entire story ahead of time. I usually know the beginning and the end, but the middle is a mystery until I get there.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have to keep track of my timeline. My current work-in-progress, The Samurai’s Inro, runs over four weeks. There were times, as I wrote, that I lost track of what day of the week it was. Harmony is a creature of habit and follows a schedule, so I had to know if it was her day for the self-defense class or to clean her refrigerator. I ended up having to go back and “walk” thru the days, to make sure I didn’t send her to work at the library on a Sunday. I ended up with three different pieces of scrap paper scattered on my desk to track her calendar. Then, because I lost track of one of the papers, I had to go back and start all over.
By the way, I love to throw Harmony off her schedule.It’s loads of fun figuring out how she would react.
And you’re right, it’s not an efficient system, if you want to call it a system at
all. But it works. Well, most of the time.
What’s more difficult is tracking a series over the course of several books. I’ve started a “book bible” for the Harmony series, but haven’t kept up with it as good as I should have. What color is Freddie’s hair? How about Sarah’s? I frequently have to go back to earlier books to get the details, and when I do, I add them the the file. (In fact, let’s play a little game. The first person to tell me what Janine’s last name is (she’s the chief librarian, remember?) will win a free ebook copy of the Samurai’s Inro when it is released. That’s a couple of months off. Leave your answer in the comments)
The Free Wolves series was a whole different creature when it came to tracking the stories. Because each book is a stand-alone story, with only the slightest of overlaps in the characters, I didn’t have to work as hard to keep things straight. They also weren’t quite so linear- I didn’t cover every single day- so I had more latitude in how each story flowed.
I’m currently working on the next-next Harmony book, and I’m 3 or 4 chapters in and still on day 1. (I’ve written everything by hand so far, and have’t the foggiest idea what the word count is.) I need to start keeping track now so I don’t end up in the same situation I was in with Inro. Will I? Somehow, I doubt it!
And that’s how I do it- track my stories, that is. I’m pretty sure we have some plotters on this hop, and I’m going to go check them out and see if they can inspire me to join their ranks.
Happy reading!
Share how you keep your characters, storylines, etc., organized. Do you use an outline? Notecards? Post-its all over your walls?
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