“Book 3” Blog post #4 – Storyline coming along nicely

The storyline for the book is coming together very quickly. I keep track of the status of each part of the storyline in a spreadsheet. Here’s the “status” column of the chapters/scenes (chapter/scene titles deleted):

R = Ready

M = Mostly Ready

N = Not Read

W = Waiting for more info

As you can see, a substantial number of blocks are either Ready or Mostly Ready.

At this point, we’re focusing on clearing those “N’s”. “M’s” are OK – that usually means there are a few details to be worked out or looked up.

Although I keep track of status, wordcounts, etc in spreadsheets, I use OneNote to organize the storyline:

You can see that the story is broken into 3 parts, and under each part is a chapter/scene. It’s difficult at this stage to tell exactly where the chapter breaks will be. As a general rule, each new “scene” will likely end up as a chapter, but there can be cases where a single scene spans multiple chapters or, more often, multiple related scenes form a single chapter.

Right now, it’s all about the story, not about the structure. And the story is coming along very nicely.