My Writing Process: Steps 13 & 14 #WritingTips | Renee Scattergood

Originally posted by Renee Scattergood:

If you haven’t already, read these first:

Step 1 | Step 2 | Steps 3 & 4 | Step 5 | Step 6 | Step 7 | Steps 8, 9, & 10 | Steps 11 & 12

It’s time to move on to Steps 13 & 14.

Step 13 is a bit involved, but quite simple to explain. The end of the story should be tied up and everything resolved. If it’s not, I add the scenes that take care of that first.

Then I start from the beginning of the story and read through each scene, making sure they tie into the next. If they don’t, I write scenes as necessary to fill in the gaps in the story. I also add other subplots if they help with further developing the characters or main plot. If there are any plot holes, I fill those in as well. If there are any scenes that don’t carry the main plot, I get rid of them. If there are subplots that don’t help define a character or carry the main plot, I get rid of those as well.

This is where I really build the final story and work out the kinks before I start writing. It saves hours of work to do this in the planning stage rather than the editing stage.

The amount of time it takes to do this depends on the length of the story. Short stories generally take an hour or two. Novels can take a day or two. If it’s an entire series, it can take a week or more.

Step 14 doesn’t take much time at all. For short stories, I skip this step. If I’m working on a series, the first thing I do is split the story up into books (i.e. Book 1, Book 2, etc.). The first thing I look at when I’m doing this is whether it’s a good breaking point in the main storyline. I also want to make sure any subplots that start in that book are tied up in that book as well (unless it’s a subplot that runs the entire length of the main story). I want each book to be a continuation of the one before, but I also want them to stand on their own as well.

If it’s a stand-alone novel, or I’m done breaking the story into separate books, then I work on breaking it down into chapters. For the most part, each chapter may just be one scene. Sometimes though, there might be two or three scenes that will fit together in one chapter.

If the POV characters in these scenes are the same, I might find a way to combine them into one scene. If the POV characters are different for each scene, I leave them as individual scenes within the chapter. This allows me to add a separator between the scenes in the chapter signifying that there is a change in POV character to the reader.

Since I use Scrivener for this work, each scene is already a separate file. So, What I do is create folders for each book and chapter and add the appropriate scene files to their folders.

This step generally takes me less than an hour, but sometimes I’ll find things I missed in Step 13 or to make the story flow better I might have to rearrange some scenes. When I’m finished with Step 14, I need to be ready to begin writing, so anything that seems off needs to be fixed now. So, there are times when this can take longer than normal.

Next week is Step 15, where I begin writing the first draft. I have a very specific method for this, however, so you won’t want to miss that step. Don’t forget that I haven’t even gotten to world building and things of that nature. That comes later!