Beating a Dead Horse

Once upon a time, many years ago, a friend and I were driving down a rural road which was bordered on either side by rows of plants protected from the elements by plastic sheeting.

“Look,” my friend said, “they’re growing hats.”

I did a double take. What?

When I looked again, I saw the field through her eyes. Yep. Row upon row of pointy plastic hats sprouting from the ground like they’d been sown by some futuristic agronomist.

In that instant, I realized people visualize the world according to the way their brain is wired.

Same thing with plotting. After ranting and raving last week, I’ve come to admit that some writers ARE capable of envisioning their story without plotting it out. They have the innate talent to know just where the turning points go…how to arc their characters’ emotional growth…the precise moment in the action where the internal and external conflict intersect.

Sadly, not me.

Maybe I haven’t read enough. Maybe I haven’t written enough.

Or (and this is my latest epiphany) maybe my brain’s too linear. Or mathematical (which is a real hoot because, trust me, math was NOT my forte in school. Ever.) And yet, I love trying to translate the writing process into something I can throw into a spreadsheet.

Lots of writers do this. In fact, author Beverly Brandt does a whole workshop devoted to it.

Most use a spreadsheet to keep track of stuff like day of the week, setting, POV character, and so on. Beverly adds a column for “story step” which corresponds to Chris Vogler’s Hero’s Journey.

Here’s my contribution: Let’s say you wanna check the progress of the romance over the course of the novel. What I do is assign a value from one to ten (ten being declarations of love and one being—well, the opposite) then assign each chapter a value according to what level you see the romance at. Once you’re finished, let Excel whip the whole thing into a graph and voila! A nice pictorial of the ups and downs of the romance. For a real thrill, retrace the same steps with levels of conflict, then overlay the result. Be sure to use different colors!

You may not write a terrific romance novel. But you’ll become a whiz at Excel.