Plotted my next novel tonight and AAAAAA. So excited for this one. Sort of…Wynonna Earp meets Pirates of the Caribbean? I’ll find some book comps for it later but it’s so fuuuuun.
And mean. Very mean. Sorry characters.
Also. I can’t believe I made it through plotting this whole thing without one of the cats jumping on the desk and scattering the cards in fifty directions.
Love this method. I used something similar, tho my cards were all white and I had marked them in the upper corner with religion, characters, society, location, etc. And I only had scene ideas noted down. I fixed the index cards under a timeline on my magnetic wall. It worked. Will see how the method holds up for the next one.
It’s such a fun method! I prefer it over digital outlines because I like to be able to see everything at once and manually shuffle stuff around. Normally I also color-code by character perspective, using a little dot in the corner of the chapter cards, but this is a single perspective novel so I didn’t need that this time around.
Also, I custom printed these cards so each one has a header specific to the card type. Character cards have name, age, gender, sexuality, and race. Chapter cards have a title section, location, time, and a dot to color in for character perspective. This novel was my first time using the custom cards and I really liked them. I’ve always worked with different color cards, but it’s hard to find colored notecards that aren’t neon, and I don’t like the neon ones because they’re annoyingly bright. Need to make a few adjustments before I print another set, but they worked quite well overall!
I’m laughing, but there’s a super useful corollary, which my husband calls “the Red Balloon.” He was a defense lawyer and had a fair number of drug addicts come through, and there is a thing where if you’re like, on your first offense, they’ll do a thing where you can go to treatment and if you complete it they’ll take the conviction off your record.
And he would tell his clients, “Look, everyone’s going to tell you not to do drugs. They’re going to say it over and over again. And it’s like, if people tell you not to think of a white elephant, you’re going to think of a white elephant. But the trick to not thinking about a white elephant is to think of a red balloon. So you need to find your red balloon. For some people it’s yoga. For others it’s woodworking. For some people it’s scrapbooking or gardening or any of a long list of things to do. They focus on that, it’s a lot easier to succeed in ignoring the white elephant.”
So yeah, “watch yourself” is one thing… but the better idea is to watch something else. (Even if it’s fanfic about werewolves fucking.)
It’s a form of productive dissociation, and is super, super helpful.
It’s easy for me to get bogged down in how much pain I’m in… but some of the most painful periods of my life have also been the most productive, writing-wise, because writing is one of my red balloons.
There is a phrase I use A LOT in my parenting and my son gets very sick of it, but it’s true:
The thing you practise is the thing you get good at.
You may not intentionally be practicing “being grumpy” but if you don’t put effort into practicing “not being grumpy” then I’m afraid that’s what you’re doing. It’s hard! It’s really hard! Sometimes, for some things, it’s pretty much impossible and that sucks!
But being carefully aware that you are going to get good at the things you do most of is a good way to be more careful of what those things are. If that makes sense.
You gotta appreciate sometimes how tumblr works in such a way that everyone who wants to reblog this interesting or useful psychological advice is also forced to reblog the thing about werewolf fucking
Because we want to feel better but also think fucking werewolves really might help.
have you considered werewolf fucking as an alternative to drugs
