Even outlines can stretch for pages and pages and they are sooo much more difficult to update. The key is to update your scene list as you write-add a row here and delete a scene there so that you can always remind yourself of what happened in your novel with relative ease. Or, you knew you set a sad mood, but have no idea how long you dragged it out-was your start too depressing? Not depressing enough? That means you may actually forget what you wrote in those early pages. Generally, however, you are writing your novel over a period of months or even years. You can’t write a novel in a month-OK, maybe you can. Norman Mailer: The scene list for Mailer's sprawling, 1,300-page novel Harlot's Ghost about the CIA.Īs you can see, every author creates their scene list differently. Joseph Heller: Remember Catch-22? Here's the author's scene list for the novel about no-win situations.ģ. JK Rowling: The mega-bestselling Harry Potter author's scene list for The Order of the Phoenix.Ģ. Want a better idea of what your scene list might look like? Here are three famous examples of scene lists:ġ. 3 Examples of Scene Lists from Famous Authors By the time I sat down to type, I had something far more detailed than a mere outline guiding me through the process. The list simply forces you to flesh them out.įor me, this step was incredibly helpful. Keep in mind that before you get to the scene list you need to know your major plot points. The particulars can be revised at your convenience, but that’s how I set it up. It’s literally a list of the scenes in your novel in an excel spreadsheet.Ĭolumn 2: One-two sentence summary of the scene.
Today we’re focusing on a particular step: the creation of a scene list. I used the Snowflake Method, which consists of several steps to designing a novel that we can discuss at a later date. So this time around, I committed to having as much of my story organized before writing as possible. I tried to write a novel once before without planning in advance.
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