Friday, August 27, 2010

Plotting - Or Why My Notebook Makes Me Look Like a Criminal

I write my books in Word, like most sane writers - at least the ones without carpel-tunnel. My editing process is so insane, I couldn't ever write longhand. But my plotting is another story.

My plotting looks like it was ran over several times by a very heavy train. My notebooks also make absolutely no sense to anyone but me. And, reading over them, it's actually kind of embarrassing how lame I am. Half of my notes sound like top-secret undercover agent info and the other half looks very schizo.

For example:

"G finds J, she tells him what she knows." (What she knows is apparently VERY mysterious to anyone reading this notebook.) The following is literally word for word: "INTENSE convo here! Work it!"

Seriously, self? I can't believe I'm sharing this.

The rest is filled up with notes like "need more scenes with A" or "scene in warehouse," etc. I have one page that has a few random jostled notes, and then in all caps the word "INSECTS!"

At one point, I literally wrote, in a very rough outline for my WIP, "We need filler here that doesn't read like filler."

*cough*

I also have pages that look like hit lists, full of people's names. Some are crossed out. It really doesn't look good.

Oh, and there's a page called "Death Songs" that I'm incorporating into one of my future WIPs. Basically, it's just a page and a half of copied poems about death.

If anyone gets a hold of this notebook, I'm gonna look like a crazy psycho emo conman agent.

Anyway. How do you guys plot*?

*Books. Not, um, death. That character list looks really bad.