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byamylaurens · 3 years

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On Structuring Plot: A List Of Useful Resources + My Recent Process

I was asked on Instagram last week how I go about structuring my stories, whether there’s a set way I like to do it, or if it’s different for every story, or what. I promised an answer last week, and that didn’t happen, but hey! It is this week and now I can answer! 😀

The truth of the matter is, I feel very self-conscious about plot structure. It’s the area of writing I’m least comfortable with, and so my attempts either end up with me just writing and ignoring structure entirely (A Fox Of Storms And Starlight), or else plotting everything else in meticulous detail, usually with the help of Liana Brooks (How Not To Acquire A Castle, as evidenced in our epic plotting video).

And then there is everything else, which tends to fall in the middle. Honestly, it depends on the book, and the mood, and how much of a concrete, specific handle I need on the story before going in.

Because that varies widely, too. When Worlds Collide, the final book in the Sanctuary trilogy that won Best Children’s Book 2019 in my state? You’re reading the first draft, prettied up with some proofreading for typos. The first book in the series, on the other hand? That’s the …eighth, I think, draft? And again, everything else falls somewhere in the middle, though generally speaking I plan my novels more than my short stories, and things that feel “fast paced” more than things that luxuriate more in the prose. Though even that’s not entirely true. And it overlaps with the length tendencies.

SO. Rather than continuing to ramble about my actual processes (variable), I thought I’d share with you a range of resources that you might find useful (if you’re a writer) or simply interesting (if you’re not, or even if you are I guess).

1. Liana Brooks’ Outlining Sheet

Liana, who you probably know is my writer-buddy and co-conspirator with regards to Inkprint Press, is excellent at plot. She does developmental edits for a really reasonable rate, and is absolutely stellar at what she does. So it’s without shame that I recommend first up her outline sheet, which is a take on the Lester Dent Plot Formula (google it).

2. Beat Sheets.

For when a general outline with key touch points isn’t detailed enough, there are beat sheets. The best ones I’ve found came from Jami Gold, and you can download them here. I’ve also converted them to word docs with scenes numbered for a 40-scene/chapter book and a 20 scene-chapter book, and you can grab those here (word docx download).

3. MICE Structure.

I posted this video on Friday, but Mary Robinette Kowal’s MICE theory has been hands down THE most useful plotting resource I’ve encountered for me personally. I’ll elaborate on this a little more below, where I’ll talk specifically about a project I’m working on right now.

4. Brandon Sanderson’s Plot Lectures.

I listened to these nearly a year ago, then relistened recently and was interested to discover I’d done something similar with Moon Shot, the project I’m currently plotting. Definitely worth a listen. It’s a little more general in scope than the preceding resources, but very necessary for a sound understanding of what your plot should be DOING.

You can also check out the posts I wrote on plot structure years ago, starting here.

Okay, now to the specifics. On Tuesday, I posted the following to Instagram, which is what precipitated the question that resulted in this post:

This is me working on Moon Shot, and it’s the first time I really used the MICE process on a longer work very deliberately, and I LOVED IT.

So I thought I’d quickly delineate for you here exactly what I did. (ETA: Quickly, ha.)

Worldbuilding. I had a giant conversation with Liana about the worldbuilding for the world, and how the main sci fi element works. She took notes and emailed them to me.

Brain Dump. I did a stream-of-consciousness dump into my notes just rambling through things roughly sequentially, and stopping to research the sciencey stuff I needed.

List Of Questions. From this, I listed out on my small whiteboard (A4-ish size) all the questions that would be asked and answered in this book. Will they escape? Why can’t they go to Earth? Who are the kidnappers? Etc.

MICE. I then colour-coded each question according to it’s MICE category: milieu, inquiry, character, event. If that doesn’t make sense, go watch Kowal’s video first (resource 3 above).

General Plotting. I broke out the bigger whiteboard (A2 size?), separated it roughly into quarters across the ‘page’, and added every question to the board. Some questions are asked right at the start of the story, so that’s where their coloured line started, then I estimated roughly when the question would be answered in-plot, and ended their coloured line there. This was hands-down the most useful part of plotting, because it let me see a bunch of things in macro: I’d overloaded the third quarter with too many answers, and there wasn’t enough in the second quarter. Certain questions COULDN’T be asked until other ones were answered, and if I left the answering too late, the next arc would be too squished before the end of the book. And so forth. So I played around, adjusting arcs until I got a fairly even spread of questions and answers across the book, with little clusters at the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. I also looked to make sure that I had enough strong questions asked in the beginning that weren’t answered until the very end.

Specific Plotting. For each arc, I now knew WHEN in the book it had to be. So I grabbed three A3 pages, taped them together in a long line, divided the page into 25 columns (see point 8 for why), and wrote headings with the basic beats of a story. Call to action, midpoint, final puzzle piece, act 2 antagonist, and so forth. See resource 2 above. Then I took my MICE arcs and started filling things in: this scene needs to answer this question and raise the next one. This scene needs to answer this question. That sort of thing. Not the specifics of what the characters are doing, but the underlying bones of what the SCENE needs to be doing.

Conflict! Once the beginnings and ends of each MICE arc were in place, I referred back to the MICE principle to figure out what kinds of conflict I needed to add. For example, one of the opening MICE arcs is a milieu question: How did the kids escape? Knowing that this is a milieu, I know I need to add points throughout the story where they run into dead ends in their attempts to escape, all the way until they actually make it out. Another MICE arc revolves around a mystery, so I knew I needed to throw red herrings and misleading information in there to influence the decisions the characters are making. I used different coloured highlighter to mark the main long-running arcs to make sure I was sprinkling them evenly throughout the book, and not accidentally ignoring one for too long.

Point Of View. I now had a really good idea of what was happening in each scene, so on to POV. Most books wouldn’t need this step necessarily, but part of the POINT of this book is that it has POV scenes from all 25 of my Year 8 students from a couple of years ago (you have not LIVED until you’ve tried this, oy, my head). AND on top of that, every character has one of eight different superpowers. So I wrote out all the character names on sticky notes, colour coded according to superpower. Then I played around. Which superpower would be useful in this scene? Which would lend an interesting lens to the events? Post-its meant I could test things and swap them around easily, until I got an order I was happy with, with the superpowers kind of evenly sprinkled throughout the book (as much as possible; they’re based on Myer-Briggs personality type, which, yes, most of the students were kind enough to do the test for me so I could allocate their powers accurately, HA, but it means some superpowers are more common than others).

Text Type. One of the only ways I could think of making this book hang together cohesively was to tell it via epistolary, which means including a bunch of other text types as well as narration (or instead of). So there are story bits, but also emails, letters, maps, interviews, transcripts and more. So once I had everything else in place, I figured out which scenes were going to be which text types so that again, there was a balance of them throughout.

PHEW. What a process. Still, overall it only took me about three hours, and it was SUPER FUN AND SATISFYING to do. I’ll DEFINITELY be doing at least steps 1 – 7 for a couple of future books, because it was just a really inherently enjoyable process for me, and makes me confident going into the book that the scenes will do what they need to do.

Here’s a sneaky peek at what some of the final outline looks like… 😀

On Structuring Plot: A List Of Useful Resources + My Recent Process was originally published on Amy Laurens

#Amy Laurens #Australian author Amy #beat sheets for writers #before you write #Brandon Sanderson #Canberra writer Amy #how to plot a novel #How to Write #Jami Gold&039;s beat sheets #Mary Robinette Kowal #plot plot plot the book #plotting masterclass #structuring stories with story structure like a well-structured story with structure #writing #writing resource #writing workshop #you too can write a story woo

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lucyariablog · 7 years

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Proofing and Editing: How to Make Your Content Less Frightening

Want to know a few scary truths ignored by too many content creators?

Editing and proofing are not the same thing. And you can’t adequately execute the two at the same time.

You can’t adequately edit and proofread at the same time, says @AnnGynn. Click To Tweet

And if you think the same person can write, edit, and proof their own work, you should be afraid, very afraid of publishing that content.

Even the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recognizes proofreaders as distinct from editors. Its description of proofreaders’ duties includes: “Read transcript or proof type setup to detect and mark for correction any grammatical, typographical, or compositional errors. Excludes workers whose primary duty is editing copy.”

What’s the difference?

Grammarly offers a succinct explanation of how a copy editor approaches content:

The tasks include checking written material for grammar, spelling, style and punctuation issues before it’s prepared for proofreading. A copy editor may also do a rewrite, if necessary, to fix any problems with transitions, wordiness, jargon, and to ensure the style of the piece fits with the publication. This work is known as revision.

In contrast, proofreaders review the content after it has gone through the editing process. They scrutinize the content in its finished and almost-published state to catch any typographical or minor errors that weren’t fixed in the editing process or were created in the production process.

For example, at CMI I edit the blog, but Lisa Higgs proofreads the posts in WordPress before they go live. With CCO magazine, I put on the proofreader’s hat, while Clare McDermott edits the articles.

TIP: If you wear a proofreader hat for some projects and an editor’s hat for others, don’t attempt to do one right after the other. Take a break. Exercise your brain with a non-word activity. If you don’t take a breather, you’re likely to be wearing both your proofer and editor’s hats – and the content review will be messy and unfocused.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: The Content Marketing Book of Answers: Managing Your Content

How to edit well

With your editor’s hat on, follow this five-step process:

Make sure you understand the overall purpose for the piece of content for the audience and for the brand before you read the first word.

TIP: Require content creators to write one or two sentences at the top of the content to explain to the editor who the intended audience is and why the content was created.

Read through the content as a reader would – hands off the keyboard except to scroll. (If reviewing in print form, keep the pen out of your hands.)

Go through the content again as an editor. Put your hands on the keyboard (or pen in hand) and note where the content doesn’t work well and why. Does the opening grab the reader’s attention? Is the content focused on a singular theme throughout the piece? Can every sentence and paragraph be understood? Does the order of the content flow logically? Does the content represent the brand’s voice and style?

Pause, then edit. Depending on your process, if the needed changes are significant, return the marked-up content to the writer to revise. If the content won’t be going back to the writer, go ahead and make the changes.

Read through a final time to ensure that the content reads well from the audience and brand’s perspective.

TIP: If you revise the content significantly, go back to the writer, especially if the article includes a byline, to make sure you edited accurately.

With the content in good shape from a readability perspective, now you can scrutinize other elements of the content. You should:

Ensure factual correctness and proper credit. If the content includes research, statistics, opinions, or quotes, make sure they are accurate and attributed correctly. In digital form, make sure links go to the original source of information (not to another post quoting the original content).

Do the math. If the content includes numbers, make sure they add up correctly. For example, if an article about favorite ice cream flavors includes the sentence: “70% agree chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla,” the next sentence should not be “one-third prefer vanilla over chocolate.” The math doesn’t add up.

Editors: if the #content includes numbers, make sure they add up correctly, advises @AnnGynn. Click To Tweet

Review with your style guide in view. Scrutinize the copy to make sure it follows your brand’s style guide and chosen dictionary. For example, the CMI Style Guide is the AP Style Guide with some minor customizations for the brand.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Write a Style Guide for Your Brand

TIP: Create checklists for editing and proofreading to ensure that each step is completed. When someone must physically check off an item from a list, he or she is more likely to do it. Plus, completed checklists with the editor and proofreader’s names also serve as a helpful tracker of who was responsible for each piece of content.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 7 Ways to Accelerate Your Content Review and Approval

How to be a good proofreader

In the proofreading stage, the work is fastidious. A proofreader should not review the content just one time and expect to catch everything that needs fixing. Like editing, proofreading is a multi-step process. Each of these steps requires its own reading of the piece of content:

Review for flow and understanding. Though the editing process should have taken care of any problems in this area, proofreaders must read through the content for their own understanding so they can properly review the content. And if flaws are found at this point, make sure to address and fix them, preferably with input from the editor.

Read each sentence for proper grammar. This is what most people consider proofreading – the subject-match-the-verb stuff.

Check spelling of each word. This sounds easier than it is. If you spell-check the same way you read (top to bottom, left to right), you’re less likely to catch errors because your brain is still reading for comprehension. Start with the last word in the content and work your way up to the top, checking each word’s spelling as you do.

Proofreading Tip: Spell-check by starting at bottom of #content and reading backwards, says @AnnGynn. Click To Tweet

Evaluate the content in published form. Review the content to make sure it appears the way it was intended. Do all the subheads follow the same typography? Are there any awkward line breaks? Does the content match the table of contents? Do all the links work?

TIP: Proofreaders should document the mistakes they find more than once. Share that information with the writer and editor to prevent (or at least minimize) future occurrences.

NOTE: If your team only has the resources for a single person to handle editing and proofreading duties, that’s OK. Just make sure to create a production schedule that at least allows for editing and proofreading to happen on separate days. You also can use tools like Hemingway App and Grammarly to help in the editing and proofreading process.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Content Marketing’s Secret Sauce? Good Workflow

Conclusion

By recognizing the truth that editing and proofreading are two distinct responsibilities, you’ll improve your content results so they won’t be as scary for your readers or your brand. You’ll also avoid spending time on big problems that arise from poor editing and poor proofreading (lack of interest and trust in your brand’s content, for example, which ultimately lead to fewer readers).

Improving your content creation is a hot topic in the CMI newsletter. Subscribe today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Proofing and Editing: How to Make Your Content Less Frightening appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/10/proofing-editing-content/

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