Charts

I know it’s been awhile since I last posted. I haven’t been doing much worthy of blogging, that is to say, I’ve been mapping my novel and rearranging scenes, and most exciting of all, I’ve been making charts.

Charts are extremely useful creatures. I’ve been making a lot of charts lately. Just today, I finished a chart that I’ve titled the “Action Tracker” where I’ve tracked the actions of each of my point of view characters by date. If you are a writer working with multiple point’s of view, I highly recommend you do this. It helps to be able to visualize where you spend too much time with one character and not enough with another, or it can help you find that there’s a stretch of ten days in which nothing happens at all.

Yesterday I made my Action Tracker and today I put it up on a cork board and completely decimated it. I took a pen to it and wrote in scenes that needed to be added. I moved scenes to different dates so that the overall action flows better, I crossed scenes out; I even got rid of a point of view character who only really had one scene.

I love this kind of work. I love writing too, but it’s this nitty-gritty picking apart of a story and piecing it back together again to make it stronger that gets me excited. I wish I could post a picture of my chart up here for you. But it’s full of spoilers and it would be difficult to photograph in any way that would actually enable the viewer to see what it is they’re looking at.

Anyway, just thought I’d give you guys a little update. Thanks for reading, I’ll try not to wait too long until the next post.