Plotting #4: Live Replot

Missed out on Day 1 of Plotting? Catch up here! There’s also Day 2 and Day 3.

Today, the climax this has all been building towards. A couple of weeks ago I was super excited to able to visit Liana in Alaska (!!!!), and while I was there, Much Plotting Occurred. We plotted 6 novel/las that week, I think, mostly mine, and plotting so many stories in such a short space of time was *really* beneficial for my plotting skills. As well as the simple repetition of skills, it was also amazing to stick everything up on post-it notes on the wall and conceptualise the whole plot at once. I’ve done this before, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had a handy door/wall/vertical space to stick post-it notes on for extended periods of time (since my writing time is extremely sporadic during the school term) and so I’d fallen out of the habit.

Anyway, we were fifteen minutes into replotting How Not To Take Over The World (officially abbreviated to HNOT) when we realised that we were actually covering A LOT of stuff that would be really useful to other writers – so we stopped, set up the computer, and filmed the whole session for you 😀 It’s totally uncut (except the brief pause in the middle where we stopped to get water and snacks) and live and messy and glorious and we’re both in our pyjamas looking TOTALLY UNGLAMOROUS, but if you can deal with that, there is some really useful plotting information here. Plus, weird accents. Yay! 😀

A couple of things to note if you didn’t read the summary yesterday:
1) Read the summary from yesterday. The video will make a lot more sense. HA.
2) The video is filmed in mirror image, so the post-its go right to left (sorry!).
3) We dive right in to talking about The Key. In this story, which you’ll know if you read yesterday’s summary, the Key is a magical artefact, a highly powerful object enabling the wielder to use vast quantities of magical power.
4) At 11 mins 30 sec I mention the Deviran backstory story – you can read The Making Of An Overlord here on the D&G blog.
5) At the end I note that I’m going to do a beat check. All that involves is running through my beat sheet (see Day 2) and making sure that the scenes I have match up to the required beats – though it won’t be a one-to-one correlation because I ended up with 47 scenes and the beat sheet allows for 40. Nonetheless, the novel did have all the necessary beats in about the right places once we were done. Yay! Success!

And if you want to follow along, you can grab the original plot we were working with in yesterday’s post, and you can see the final revised plot here 🙂

Tune in tomorrow for our final plotting recap 🙂

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