Mapping your Novel

My new YA book, Feast, is almost ready to go to my editor, Sarah. This is a good place to be! I’ve done the frantic early writing where my ideas feel fresh and new, and the long walks up and down the hill behind my cottage when I can’t envision how it will all fit together. I’m past the stage where I have to force myself to write scenes and new dialogue. I’m even past the stage where I’m reading the manuscript to eradicate unhelpful words like “really” “very” and “something.” The book feels complete, like it’s a story I’d be happy to show others. I’m sure Sarah will point out weaknesses I didn’t see, and I’ll have more work to do this winter, but for now I feel satisfied.

Novel Map for Feast

One of my final steps is to make sure all the various plot lines are developed logically. This involves a lot of jumping around in the text to find different scenes and read them sequentially. Most of the time my book feels bigger than my head and I can’t hold all the parts inside it and see if it progresses in a logical order. That’s when the writing program Scrivener is amazing. You can corkboard your scenes and then flip back to your outline easily. I used to do this on giant sheets of thin paper over my desk, with colour-coded scenes. I recently took down some of these posters, one for a book I won’t write, another for a long finished project. The wall is very blank now.

 

Somehow, my Scrivener scene list felt like not enough. When I merged my book into a Word document, I stopped updating my Scrivener Corkboard and was without a map to the book. I missed my giant wall posters. So, I decided to create one by hand for Feast. This was a great way to reacquaint me with a book I’ve taken a break from for the summer, and also allowed me to see where there were holes in my story development. And somehow, it was easier to have old-fashioned hand written notes to refer back to.