m. c. de marco

Alexandra Sokoloff asks What’s your structure? I need to write a short story by the end of the month, but it still has no plot. Fortunately, short story structure is simpler than novel structure: just seven points.

Via @Scrivener: Alexandra Sokoloff’s blog is full of plot advice for NaNoWriMo taken from the silver screen. See especially her story elements checklist. I wish I’d known about her October Outline month back in October.

I decided to experiment with phase drafting by using the phase system to write a prologue for my NaNoWriMo novel. My outline was 180 words, with a target of 10 draft words per outline word. Altogether this would have been just one day’s writing on my usual NaNoWriMo schedule.

But it seems I did not have my phasing quite worked out, because I ended up with 3800 words—-and I don’t approve of prologues to start with. I will have to try again with Chapter 1 and see if I can cram more detail into my outline.

Via a mailing list: Johanna Harness contemplates a new kind of outline, Lazette Gifford’s phase drafting, just in time for NaNoWriMo.

I was attempting to do the pre-rough draft by writing more about each chapter. It was going okay, but the ideas weren’t flowing as well as they do in full rough-draft writing.

By breaking scenes into phases, the action flows. There may be 300 or more phases to be developed in the rough draft.

I need to write a novel synopsis or two, so I googled for advice. Pat McCutcheon has a book about it, Writing the Fiction Synopsis: A Step by Step Approach , but I don’t think I need quite that much advice.

Crawford Kilian’s Advice on Novel Writing has a synopsis section that covers the basics. Bill Johnson has an essay about Writing a Story Synopsis which focuses on getting your theme into a one-page synopsis.

WriteCraft’s Synopsis Secrets involve a long list of don’ts (in the sidebar). Pagewise has a list of do’s.

Sometime’s it’s easiest to learn by example. Charlotte Dillon provides a sample synopsis.

My overall favorite is Beth Anderson’s Barebones Synopsis Page, which gives a step-by-step, synopsis-by-synopsis approach.

I needed to plot-doctor a few stories for a non-literary genre market, so I googled the classic 7 point plot. Here’s the basic Point Plot Outline. Zed at MemeMachineGo! described his experiences with the 7 point plot structure.