How To PLOT Your Novel Using Scrivener | FREE Scrivener Template

so let's take this whole writing process and let's just make it a little easier hey everybody welcome back if you haven't been here before my name is jane calmes i am a writer of historical cozy mysteries and i am so pumped for this episode we're going to be talking about scrivener and we're going to be digging in deep on it my friend author brittany wang and i are both kind of in love with scrivener because it is such a powerful tool for helping you write your novels so we're both going to be talking about our scrivener process today i'm going to be showing you my book template so this is what i use to take my books from the planning stages all the way through to completion and revision and it started off based on save the cat but it has a lot of my own modifications and additions and it's become a really powerful tool for me you can actually grab this template for free just hop on down to the links below and sign up for my newsletter and when you're done with that you are definitely going to want to click the link for brittany's video brittany is going to be telling you about her five act structure for serial novels which i am so excited about i think serial novels are going to be the next big thing for self-publishing authors and britney has a great layout for it it includes a little snowflake method but again also many of her own editions that really make it a special and unique tool that you are not going to want to miss there's a lot to love about scrimmer but the main thing about it the thing that you're going to love and that's going to keep you organized is that it allows you to store several files within the same project and you can store relationships among those files so you can put several of them in a subfolder or make collections of files we're going to dig into all of this but i love scrivener because it is just great for planning i use several files to plan my novel several more to actually write it and then i can bounce among them returning to my plan revising it and really staying organized with no effort so here we are and this is my template at the top here we have manuscript and this is where i actually write the book but we're not going to deal with that yet we are going to jump down to story structure because this is where i begin work so story structure has two parts story beats and story lines story beats this is where things started off based on the blake snyder beat sheet from save the cat so the blake snyder beat sheet is is really a wonderful list of the kind of moments that need to happen in your storyline in order for it to feel resonant there's the opening image where we first meet the character and find out what their long-standing problem is there's the catalyst which other people sometimes call the inciting incident and that's where things get kicked off and the debate where the character kind of grapples with whether they feel up to the challenge whether they're really going to commit to this challenge so i explain all of these beats in my video on cobra kai i kind of take you through that whole story and show you how each of the beats play out you can definitely watch this and i will put the link in the description below but for right now let's just take a look at this folder so i've got all the beats from the blake snyder beat sheet but i do have a few of my own little tweaks for example in the original beat sheet opening image is one beat i kind of split that into opening image where we have kind of the hook and the first introduction of our character an opening status where we see what his chronic problem is and another one i renamed is break into two in the original beat sheet and renamed it the challenge accepted because that's what the character does at this point they commit to going on the journey so what i do when i start a novel is i just bounce around this folder i fill in ideas for each of the c well each of the beats beats are not seen so we're going to talk about that a little bit more um and when i have most of the beats kind of filled in when i have ideas for all of them then i'm getting ready to finish but first i want to take a look at my storylines folder so storylines is just kind of where i have a place to keep track of what's going on in each individual storyline of my book for example you can see that i named the a story a cute issue so that's basically the primary plot the big problem that the characters trying to solve in this in this story and for example in a christmas carol the acute issue is dealing with the ghosts traveling with them and enduring everything that they want to show scrooge and then the b story is the chronic issue so that is often the character arc or perhaps a relationship that needs to reach some sort of resolution um in a christmas carol the chronic issue is scrooge's greed it's the long-standing problem that made it necessary for him to go on this journey and change but then you can see i have a lot of other story lines here because i like a book with a lot of story lines and at the bottom here i have a couple that are named threads there's no real difference between a storyline and a thread except just that the thread is shorter and generally it doesn't really have a lot of scenes of its own for example in my upcoming kitty callahan novel um there's a thread where she changes the way she dresses um she is a secretary in 1928 chicago and she begins wearing a fedora which is weird because that's a man's hat and in the 1920s women really did not adopt men's wear looks it just wasn't a thing that was done but it's important to her to identify as a detective and be identified as such and so the thread is very brief it's just you know sees the hat buys the hat where's the hat um but it's still nice to have a place where i can keep track of this so that i'm sure that i'm contributing this information to my scenes and you can actually even change the colors of these storylines so scrivener allows you a lot of little icons that you can use to change the way a document looks in the folder over here um so this is set up to be a way station flag so we could change that to green and then later we could mark all of the scenes in that particular storyline as a collection and we could color that collection green so it would just be kind of a way to visually keep track of things i don't do that because i often run out of characters i tend to have eight or nine story lines and threads and they only have seven charac seven colors here but it's definitely a thing that you might find worth doing so once i've got both story beats and story lines filled out i've got a lot of information for my book and from time to time things are starting to get a little bit confusing here and there so that's why i've got this folder down here queries so this is simply to give me a place to journal about potential problems going on with my novel and what i would do is i would simply uh add a document here and maybe i type why does she go why does she go along with the plot and this would be a place to just write my thoughts write possibilities for how i could resolve this problem with the story and it's just a nice thing to have for planet so what story structure is more or less done and the primary queries have been resolved hey i get to go up to the top and work on my manuscript so my manuscript is going to be divided into five arcs this is just what makes sense to me for how i think the novel um the first arc is the challenge accepted where we learn the problem and decide to go on that journey the second arc is called it's all fun and games and here's when we start going on the journey we start getting into the special world of the story and the these scenes are really for having a lot of fun with but then we reach the midpoint and arc three is things fall apart things change dramatically at the midpoint and start getting worse for your character act four is called go the hard road and this is where the character goes all out he gives up on any fears or withholding he had and he goes hardcore for solving this story um and act five day new mom so when i'm ready to write what i do is i'll go up to this first book and i will add a document and when it comes in it shows up with this nice unticked checkbox so i will name my scene um maybe i'd name it dance marathon but i actually kind of like to give my scenes funny names so maybe i'd call this dip me mr gallo which is the name of my detective so i'll take a look at my beats i'll see what needs to belong in this arc and i will add scenes for all of them and i'll give them each names and work on them right in here and when a scene is finished all i do is i change the icon to a ticked box and this gives me a nice satisfying little visual clue to say this much of the book is done um another thing i may do in this document as perhaps i will run into trouble with a scene or maybe i have some revision notes that i need to make on it so what i do is i create another document and i just pull that document up until it's hovering over the scene name and drop it so that essentially turns the scene into a folder with this other document as a sub document in that folder i'll name this document notes on dip me mr gallo and then this is just a place where i can put revision notes um maybe if i snipped some text out of the original scene but i'm not sure i'm totally done with it i can just drop that in here this is just a place to keep notes on that particular scene another thing i'll do is if i run into big trouble and something in the scene isn't working at all well then i may need this icon the little warning icon so again this is just a visual clue to let me know what's going on with my book and where i need to put my attention and the last visual clue i use in this section is you notice that this book up here for act one is green so that is the color i use for a completed act the other acts are all colored blue and i just color them in it's a nice satisfying thing to see those books colored in and to feel like that part of the book is done so there are actually a lot of colors available to you you could actually take your book from planned to completed to revised to completely edited but i don't really feel like i need that just having two colors for not done and done is good enough for me so let's just take a look at some of the other features in this template let's close up the manuscript document here and right at the top we've got start here so this is just a place where i put notes about what i was working on at the end of a particular writing session when you open up scrivener it does dump you right into the same file at the same point as when you close the program but from time to time that's not enough of a clue for me to know exactly what i was working on maybe i was massaging a storyline for consistency and so i was you know i was in and out of several documents and this is just a place where i can put a brief note to myself so that i know where to start when i come back to writing then we've got the book metadata folder so i've got three documents under here possible titles promotional text so this would be like the blurb on the back of your book ideas for promotion so ideas for ads or the book launch and you can add whatever here ideas for editors you might want to work with ideas for the cover but basically anything that is about the book but isn't actually book goes right here and it's just a place to keep track of that information for yourself then we've got my clues folder so clues is a particular interest to me as a mystery writer but really anytime your characters need to puzzle out something it might be useful to you you know maybe you've got some characters in a sci-fi who need to understand a alien species way of thinking or maybe in a fantasy you know they would need to figure out why their magic isn't working the way they expect so clues just has one document and it is a spreadsheet and as spreadsheets go pretty simple um clues and then on the right we have information contributed so i could fill out either of these first let's say that i've got a con man sleuth who is going to steal a painting and i know that painting is going to contribute some really cool information to solving the case i would put painting over here and as i'm working through the planning process eventually i'll figure out exactly what information it needs to contribute and i'll put it over here but it can go the other way maybe i have a couple of characters who seem like they're at odds but are actually working together secretly well i want my characters to figure that out but i don't know how yet so i'll just put over here on information contributed a and b are working together and then later on i may figure out exactly what clue is going to tell my salute that and i'll add it over here you know maybe they both have clothing from the same university or something else that indicates that they have a relationship of long-standing after clues we have deprecated scenes so this is just a place for me to store scenes that i have cut from my novel but i'm not sure i'm completely 100 ready to delete then we've got characters so characters has two parts the first is just a master character list and this is just the alphabet right down the page and it's a place for me to put my character names you know maybe i name somebody in the first scene marion and then i'm in the middle of the book i have a minor character i need to name and i'm about to call him mick so i come into my master character list i see that m already has an entry and maybe i rename him maybe now he's nick um because i just want to try and differentiate the names as much as possible to help readers keep track of it so this is an easy way for me to do that and then if we add a document to characters we're going to get my character template so let's add a document here and you see it it's called character sketch we'd put his name right here and [Music] right up at the top and then i have a bunch of entries here to help me define what he looks like what he believes in uh what he's going to be good at and not so good at in the story um what's his storyline his little character arc and his introduction how are we first bringing him on scene in a way that lets the reader know who he is so these are the blanks that i found most useful in defining a character for myself and i'm going to be digging in deep on all of these in a future video after characters comes places and like characters when you add a document it's going to pull up a little sketch to help you define that setting so we add a document and we get our settings sketch we're just going to put in a name for the setting and whoops and then we've got a place to kind of determine you know what are these sights sounds and smells in this area what are the unique things about it that we don't want to miss when we write our scene after places comes research so in scrivener you can drag a webpage directly into your research folder so i'm just going to show you exactly what that looks like i've got a wikipedia page up here yeah i've got my wikipedia page for chicago so i'm just going to grab the icon for that webpage drag it directly over the research folder and drop and then it might take a second and now it shows up directly in your scrivener file and you can just read your research from right here so you can create documents for all the different settings all the different things that you want to research and it's a great way to keep track of stuff and last i've got my feedback folder so this is just a place to keep track of what people are telling me about my book beta readers and my writing group so what i will do is i will just add a document under here and i'll type the name of the beta reader or if it's my writing group maybe i will type writing group and also type the name of that particular meeting and then i will just type feedback right into here later i'm going to condense it decide on which points of feedback i want to take and which i am willing to override and i will probably change that into revision notes and put them under the scenes above in that notes on a particular scene document that i showed you and then we've got the template sheets that just have the character sketch and setting sketch and the trash so that is my scrivener template and it has been a huge tool for me to keep me organized while i'm writing my books you can get this template for free just scroll down down to the links below and sign up for my newsletter and if you feel like this was a template that might be of help to you please hit the like button that is the best compliment you can give me and subscribe if you haven't and do not forget to check out brittany's video it's going to be the first link in the description below and she's going to give you a whole different take on the scrivener workflow brittany is a smart organized writer and you are not going to want to miss her video check out

Channel: Jane Kalmes - Fiction Technician

Views: 815

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: writing tips, scrivener, scrivener template, scrivener save the cat, save the cat template, blake snyder beat sheet, blake snyder save the cat, scrivener tips, how to plot in scrivener, how to write a novel in scrivener, how to outline a novel, outline a novel in scrivener, how to use scrivener, writing with scrivener, write a book in scrivener, write a novel in scrivener, jane kalmes, fiction technician, authortube, scrivener tricks, outline in scrivener

Id: TncY0mvQfdg

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020