Screaming Fruit at Water

Right now I'm trying to lay out all of my scenes for Cold Blooded. I'm going to need a lot of them, judging by how long my scenes tend to be, and how long this book needs to end up. I'm talking like 80 scenes, which, frankly, seems like a shit ton. I'm basing this off of what I learned from this blog post. I tend to write very short scenes, probably because I refuse to describe anything that doesn't look like a crime scene. But that means I need about 10 scenes before I even get to the inciting incident. Or less, longer scenes. Either way, this is all just setup. For an 80,000 word book, I need about 10,000 words of setup. Does that sound boring? I think that sounds boring. But what do I know.

My system right now is just figuring out the basic progression of events. So I have three things to determine for each scene:

• What needs to happen? How is the plot going to be progressed in this scene? What characters and elements need introduced?
• Who needs to be there? Technically, this is who else needs to be there. As the novel is in 1st Person POV, the main character is there by default.
• What could go wrong? Not necessarily what will go wrong. Just because things could go sideways at a given moment doesn't mean they will. But I want to keep my options open.

Hopefully this will help me lay out a general plotline. Then if I realize that something else needs to occur in there somewhere, I can stick it in before I actually start writing the narrative.

This might seem a little stream of consciousness because I'm writing it while I'm working, and I'm reporting things to you as I learn them. So I've been looking at where various plot beats should happen, percentage-wise (like the 1st Plot Point is at 25%, the Midpoint at 50%, the Climax begins at 88%, etc.). And I compared it to my rough draft. I have 40 scenes in there. I take 40, multiply it by whatever percentage, at it tells me which scene that thing should happen.

And wouldn't you know it, even in my piece of shit, thrown together, barely planned rough draft… most of them are right where they should be. Are you impressed? I'm impressed.

I had printed out my list of rough draft scenes and what happened in them a while ago. I have finally started scribbling on it, and it really seems to help. Except for the part where I can't read my own writing. It's like I think about the shape a letter should be, and then just don't do it. It's the La Croix of penmanship.

But anyway, I at least have most of the major structural beats more or less where they need to be. Some of them will be changed, or blended with other things, or whatever. The issue now becomes the fact that I need to take these 40 scenes, about half of which I already cut, and expand them to about 80. So I need a lot more stuff in between my stuff. And then I need to fill out all that stuff into more rounded and flavorful stuff.

I need more stuff.

I'll see you… next week, maybe? Are we back to some kind of schedule? We'll see.