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would get put in stocks for sake of this
Oct. 22nd, 2012 08:15 pmThanks to some good suggestions/feedback here and elsewhere online, I graphed my plot today:
...x-axis works by chapter; y-axis, which is "relative plot importance", runs from "that's cool" to "OH SHIT BEARS". Each plot thread has its own color of marker. As I was saying on twitter, it is a very squishy scale, but hey--whatever works.
I have realized that part of why I am running out of steam at this point is because I am not very good at large-scale plotting. There's a certain amount I can extrapolate and make bigger and then my brain stops working. Maybe I need someone to kick me and say, "More explosions!" Maybe I just need a brain that can handle all fifteen plot threads and character arcs and put it all together for me. Maybe I need to stop whining and just write the damn thing.
(This is also a "change feet" moment, where the big green plot thread recedes and the brown one soars up again. Changing feet in a novel is always hard. No momentum for the moment, a calm before the storm, a point where Heather has to stand up and drive events herself, and so particularly hard to jump back in after a long time away.)
But I have skipped/skimmed through a lot of Whisper-Trail-so-far in making the graph, which has gotten the novel-so-far considerably more back in my head than it was, anyway. Maybe one of these days I will start putting words down again; that'd be nice.
...x-axis works by chapter; y-axis, which is "relative plot importance", runs from "that's cool" to "OH SHIT BEARS". Each plot thread has its own color of marker. As I was saying on twitter, it is a very squishy scale, but hey--whatever works.
I have realized that part of why I am running out of steam at this point is because I am not very good at large-scale plotting. There's a certain amount I can extrapolate and make bigger and then my brain stops working. Maybe I need someone to kick me and say, "More explosions!" Maybe I just need a brain that can handle all fifteen plot threads and character arcs and put it all together for me. Maybe I need to stop whining and just write the damn thing.
(This is also a "change feet" moment, where the big green plot thread recedes and the brown one soars up again. Changing feet in a novel is always hard. No momentum for the moment, a calm before the storm, a point where Heather has to stand up and drive events herself, and so particularly hard to jump back in after a long time away.)
But I have skipped/skimmed through a lot of Whisper-Trail-so-far in making the graph, which has gotten the novel-so-far considerably more back in my head than it was, anyway. Maybe one of these days I will start putting words down again; that'd be nice.