#FirstDraft60 Day 45: Thursday Craft Day–Storyboarding to Avoid the Sagging Middle

So when I get into the middle of writing and I’m starting to lose steam or feel stuck, I’ll either spend some more time reviewing the images I’ve already found (saved in OneNote or PowerPoint or pinned to a dedicated board on Pinterest), or I’ll search out more images (or movies or TV shows featuring the templates I’ve chosen, since I almost solely use actors) in order to see if I can find inspiration for new scenes or new aspects of the characters that can infuse me with motivation to get back to writing the story. For example, here’s a video of my heroine, Meg, whose Real World Template is the model Valerie Lefkowitz):

(And, no, I’m not giving her ugly, yellow-framed, fake glasses or a French bulldog. But this really helps me out a lot in shaping Meg’s personality, how she moves, what her body-language is.)

All but two of my eleven published novels were sold based on synopses and proposals, and those synopses varied from detailed to somewhat vague. But once I started writing, I got caught up in the minutia of the characters and the dialogue and the setting and sometimes lost sight of where the story was supposed to be going—and forgetting some of the scenes I’d had ideas for when I first wrote the synopsis. Which usually brings my momentum to a screeching halt and means it can be days or even weeks on end without producing meaningful word count.

So that’s when I knew it was time to stop and break out the Post-it Notes:

Here are two examples from two different books (and two different rooms!) of how I did my scene cards. They’re color-coded by POV character. In the upper (light wall) image, which was when I was writing Ransome’s Crossing, the stickies in the top section represented the scenes/chapters I’d already written—I’d gone through and re-read my entire manuscript and wrote a one- or two-sentence summary of it. As I was doing that, I was sometimes reminded of follow-up/consequence scenes I needed to write spawned by what was already there. I also went through and re-read the synopsis and wrote out scene cards for the scenes I’d already plotted there. So those are the stickies in the bottom section of the top image.

In the lower (dark wall) image, I did the same first step once I got to my flummoxed point when writing The Art of Romance—going through and re-reading what I’d already written and writing out cards for each scene. The below that, you can see hanging (lowest) on the wall, a page from the Post-it Flip Chart that has my seven-beat outline written out on it, with synopses of what happens in each step. Then, on the page still attached to the flip chart, I was making notes of scenes that I wanted or needed to write. And, interspersed throughout on the smaller Post-its, both with the scene cards and with the character images, are notes on ideas or backstory or tidbits I was thinking about incorporating in the story.

With later books, when I was spending less time working at home and needed my storyboarding more portable, I went back to a previous (old, old) method using PowerPoint:

As if color-coding the “cards” by POV character weren’t enough, in PPT, I can include an image of the character, just in case I forget which color is which character. Each “card” includes the setting (red text) and a summary of what happens in that scene.