Writing.Com General Discussion

To add onto what Zen is saying, I'm starting my novel rewrite using CS Lakin's templates.

She has a 12 Pillars template for fleshing out story/character details (not quite plot). I did the top 4 because those were free on her site.

She has a 20 Key Scenes template. This to me is crucial to grasp how a story arc stereotypically goes. The gist is things get worse before they get better, but its more complicated then that :) Free from her website, including blogs she did where she maps real people's books (they volunteered) to the 20 Key Scenes. So you can see how did they hit those points (or failed and why that matters).

She has a Scene template. Similar, but different to Zen's. Also free from her website.

don't have time to look up links for you, but you can google her up, then use the Search on her site (that's what I did).

I find making the outline just as creative as the actual writing. I am doing all the imaginary movie making, without the labor of writing 80K words to see if it made a good story. I am doing all the "Brown would do this, then Alex would respond" and "what if a giant penguin showed up..." Which only cost me a few bullets on the outline, rather than hours writing pages to be thrown away.

That's important. The 20 Key scenes demonstrated for me how a "typical" fantasy story arc works, so I made my idea fit within that, which I think made the plot better, not worse. It didn't damage my characters or my core idea of what the story was about. It did challenge me to figure out a Theme, and what to do for the "betrayal" at bullet A4 which I may never have thought to do.