A Cool Diagnostic Tool for Writers
I learned this recently from a Film Courage video. (Check them out. This lady interviews film writers and teachers of film writing. A lot of what they say is applicable to fiction.) This a tool to help you chart out the dramatic peaks and valleys of your story. Step one: Outline your story. Step two: Decide a scoring system to quantify how dramatic your scenes are. I’m going from 1 to 5 and using little Os because I love Os. Some people use these. – Step three: Put Os or dashes or whatever next to your scenes. Step four: Flip the chart on its side, and you have a climax graph. :) Here’s an un-flipped chart I made for the first three chapters of my novel. (If you turn your device 90 degrees, you can see the climax graph.) Chapter 1 Scene one O Scene two O O Scene three O O O Scene four O O Scene five O O O O Chapter 2 Scene one O Scene two O O Scene three O O O Scene four O O O O Chapter 3 Scene one O Scene two O O O Scene three O O O O O Personally, I got a lot of bang for my buck out of this. The first chart I made showed me that the highest dramatic point in chapter three was like, two or three Os. And suddenly it hit me that I’d been missing out on the perfect way to add stakes. Just looking at your work at a distance, in visual form, gives a ton of perspective, especially if you’ve been buried in it for months (or years, in my case).
