Writing process–my colour charts
Following on from last month’s posts about how I wrote, edited and published Dream of Asarlai, a few people have shown an interest in my colour charts, so I thought I’d tell you a little more about them and show you.
The idea came to me courtesy of Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbelestier. Last year, for Nanowrimo, they did a series of posts on aspects of the writing process and a couple of them talked about meta documents, that is documents related to the WIP.
Scott put up a blog about pace charts. In this blog Scott talked about using Scrivener’s corkboard to track each chapter and see where the tension was building, where there was action, where there was release and getting an idea on how your novel was moving. In that blog, he linked to an earlier one by Justine in which she talked about the spreadsheets he used to use.
It all sounded great to me – I needed a tool to enable me to look at my manuscript objectively, and because I knew plotting and narrative drive aren’t necessarily my strong suit, something to help with that would be great too.
So I opened up a spread sheet and started to devise what I was going to do.
As you can see from this, some things are immediately clear – novel starts with a bang, there’s plenty of magic through the book, Ione and Stephen have a pretty equal face time on the page and around chapter twenty, it gets really slow. There’s a bit of action, there’s a bit of kinda action, there’s plenty of magic but there’s a whole lot of sitting around and talking. Not a good way to start the second half of the book.
Compare that now to the colour chart for the eighth draft.
Not as much teal blue in the second half there – I‘ve re-written or rearranged scenes so there’s more action. Nothing major – but it’s moving up to the last big final battle scene.
So this is one way in which to look at your plot and gain some objectiveness about it. Any further questions – feel free to ask.
