I'M LEARNING TO OUTLINE // save the cat vs. 3 act, 9 block, 27 chapters vs. snowflake method

hey guys I'm Kate welcome back to my channel and in a couple days I'm going to be doing something kind of crazy I'm going to be revisiting my 24 hour read-a-thon part of this is because I have this whole 2020 rule about no new stories and I don't like that rule frankly so I'm giving myself a little bit of a reprieve here to do some drafting on a news story but I think you did had to be teaching me another sort of lesson you see how I lied to myself about this yes the lesson I've been wanting to learn for a while is how to outline basically this is a part of the writing process that a lot of people really love but has never really worked for me I've tried it sort of like I've have committed to outlining or doing like Freytag's pyramid and then completely forgetting about what by outline was in the first place but because I only have 24 hours with which to attempt to write the story I need to have as much outlined and figured out before I even start drafting no time during this 24 hours should be spent thinking about what's to come next it's just writing I might have to take some time to like compose myself you know so we're around our 17 or so there should be through no fault of the story the story should be set so when doing that I figured that I should try three different outlining methods the first one is save the cat now I have at this point read through about part of the way in the future I might try at the novel one but I have taken this and I have made oh a whole bunch of notes in fact okay you see my save the cat part right there so I have one and a half two or three pages I'll save the cat plotting I've actually figured every single beat out and I'm so excited you can see here I was initially struggling with like the dark minute of the soul all is lost bad guys closed in phase but I worked backwards which I talked about another blog in order to sort of figure this out the only thing remaining is sort of this whiff of death and that seems more optional though you know I'm still thinking you know however I did post to my Instagram basically saying that I finished this day if they can't method what other outlining method should I try and I received a whole lot of wonderful suggestions mostly talking about these snowflake method and the three 9 block 27 chapter method the Caddy tastic made-up so those are the two that I'm going to work on throughout this vlog again save the cat save the cats do it I done did saved it oh let's get the right mood in here it's nice and cloudy outside be perfect to out language I'm also drinking some coffee from my NaNoWriMo mug so I think that means that we should start oops with katytastic three-act 9 blocks 27th chapter method Italian there is because she's the first person I ever saw dude NaNoWriMo vlogs in Casey we're not in my head somehow now I found her breakdown of these blocks on me be your own mentor website but she does also have a video on this which I might watch if I need a little bit more help but I actually think that this right up it was really detailed as I was first reading it so I did see some initial similarities we'll save the cat regarding like this kind of fun in games aspect in this idea of delivering upon the promise of the premise sort of thing but I did also notice some differences and I think that while this is more structured kind of than safe the cat in that there's 27 sort of bullet points to hit as opposed to like 11 or something 914 I don't know I also think it's sort of more immediately helpful and that you can just read her little one or two-sentence description of what it is in a make sense across more genres than when I initially read saved the cat without perusing through the entirety of the book yes that's my quick review I guess we'll find out if I think that's still true once I finish that's probably important to note that I did already of course do save the cat so I have a better idea now about my story then I did you know before all of this but I think this is what's gonna be fun because to the best of my knowledge at least snowflake method is like even more sort of in-depth so this is a build it's all a built at one block one so I did actually have to go to the YouTube video because in it she sort of lays this all out and then gives an example and works through it so far I'm liking how it's sort of broken out into percentages like this should happen in the first 10% this is like the twenty five percent mark kind of thing similar to what save the cat did I do really like this kind of focus on the circular nature of these thesis and then the action disruption and then the kind of reaction or struggle sort of thing right here the only difference I'm really seeing so far as I'm kind of flipping back between the two is that in save the cat there's this focus or at least there's some effort into this B's story as I'm minutely filling this one out what happens is that I think it follows the sort of main plot really well or the sort of like bump-bump-bump which maybe is what you need for outlining but sometimes I tend to struggle with how to incorporate the minor or subplots in with the main plot and making sure that they all kind of cohesively push the rest forward and so far I'm not really seeing a way that purposefully breaks that up or mentions them but for a sort of linear progression I do like this and much like with anything I think the point of all of these or at least for me is to sort of brainstorm different scenes so different scenes will fit in to these blocks and I already have a potential one additional scene that I have thought up and I haven't really even filled out through block 3 yet so already this is helping yeah had to get some sustenance [Applause] okay so I'm taking instead of writing this out I'm actually going to do it in Scrivener so that I can see all like 27 of the chapters sort of laid out like this frankly just because while my nuke system worked for a safety cat I do a lot of like arrows and crazy stuff and when you're getting down to the 27 chapter sort of thing it just gets to be too much so we're gonna transfer this I'm only at about block six right now so this is as good a time as any to do so first I need a new text and this is going to be my first chapter and then I'm thinking of sort of doing some sort of color coding system or changing the icon so I'll know which sort of block or act this is an okay I now have it set up where you can see all of the blocks and then if you go into the individual block you can see the chapters well now it's just time to fill in what I have up until block six [Music] all right and now it's time for me to reference back to the blocks again as I try and fill out the remaining sections here I only have one last one to do this converge moment now might be a good time to point out that I had my cappuccino and then switched over to black coffee because even though I'm wearing the same sleep clothes that I was maybe yesterday it is a new day and actually all of this outlining hesitate could be like a whole week in a house at least eight but but I was about to say how far out lighting was and all this stuff but actually I think I've done with both saves cat and d3i book 27 chapters Duras let's go over this I did decide to go ahead and type up all my safe the cat notes and then I kept the blocks looking like this but then in each block we can kind of look at it like this save the cat makes a difference around the midpoint where it talks about having a false peak or a false collapse and something in that moment struck an AHA where I was like I freaking got it now and then again as I said I worked kind of backwards to get to it same thing here where I was able to get up to about clock five with the midpoint and then after that block six was kind of confusing and then I worked backwards again I think because save the cat is only 15 beats I'm better able to kind of see what the story structure looks like visually rather than having 27 things and my brains just kind of fuzzy with that however doing the 27 chapters allowed me to kind of pinpoint some more individual scenes than save the cat kind of did like it got a expand on that I think having both of these but especially the three out 9 block 27 chapter method is going to help keep me on target through all these sort of different layers like where my character is supposed to be at emotionally so that's good that's great especially because it's something I tend to struggle with when I'm at the middle so kind of breaking it down each way even when all I put is like one simple sentence I'm excited to actually break this down and to see another the thing here the thing all of the things so many things is that I'm telling this and another kind of diary format that's gonna be like the narrative element so I'm really gonna get to play around with what is happening immediately like if she has her diary or her journal and she's like holed up in the bathroom trying to write out what just happened what she thinks is gonna happen all sorts of stuff versus her like reflecting on it because she didn't get to write her entry until a couple of days or hours later so it's just gonna be fun to sort of play around with and I think having these emotional beats sort of figured out better will help me when I do each individual entry yes so now all I need to do is make another folder and label it the snowflake method I'm trying to do this with one hand while I hold the camera not my smartest decision but it worked also I have have a loan from the Internet's video up so I'm actually going to take a break from all of this outlining and go on a walk outside this social distancing and staying away from people is really good also what I found is that unfortunately because the world feels very doom and gloom right now and because it is quite doom and gloomy outside which you can't see but maybe you will later if I take you with me I just I need air it's like I need more fresh air than usual and also I just need a break for about like me okay so I have pulled up the arethey blog which kind of does it in six steps based off of the original post from this is named Randy is this you Randy Randy from Randy murky goes into more depth about it but you can see the kind of steps that we're gonna take in order to make our snowflake I should note that the first step is like basically coming up with a one sentence summary of your novel which safe the cat does mention or at least the screenwriting version that's the entire beginning is working through the pitch and there's a lot of different smaller steps that they have in order to build upon that pitch but I did a little bit of it I didn't really do it so this is gonna be the first time I do it but I did want to point out that this also have that fly both fly what that being said let's get to fricken coming up with ten words or less for this story usually I try and do this after the story's done or like during revision I'm always so bad at it so okay which we love you will call this the ones and ten summary and trying gold so that I basically know where we're starting out at oh look see oh my head looks weird that way stats obsessed high school sophomore poster songs online and becomes famous overnight one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen now it's probably the time to mention that this is the closest to like a character similar to me or I'm gonna be working through some of my own struggles or the things that I struggled with in high school through this character I've never done something like this quite on the nose before but the stats obsessed that disorder thoughts around eating and then of course some amount of like drive to make or do something yes is that a good one sit in summary I don't know but I feel like it at least tells you something it tells you something I don't know if it was something that I wanted to tell you but it tells you so if we scroll down the next thing up is to expand it into a one paragraph summer exposition first plot point midpoint plot point to climax and denouement okay I feel like here's a good time to actually switch back to the og okay step two take another hour and expand that sentence into a full paragraph describing the story setup major disasters and ending of the novel which is basically what they said three disasters plus an ending each of the disasters takes a quarter of the book to develop and the ending takes the final quarter interesting okay he does say I don't know if this is the ideal structure it's just my personal taste I should state that before I get too far it says that step two supposed to take an hour and it turns out that step one was supposed to also take it anywhere I do think it's probably very important to take some amount of time to do this I would have a better sentence if I took an hour to try however I'm just gonna mentally think about it over the next couple days before my experiment starts and we'll see if I come up with anything better so maybe we should start with the good news first because I did give up on this experiment just after it asked me to get more in depth of the characters I was just like I also do it what's inside when it said some of the first things I need to do is name the characters and y'all know how I feel about naming characters I did manage actually okay initially I was writing out this one-page summaries which I thought was going to turn into a four-page summary because it was just so long and then I just ended up doing bullet points for each scene so I have not seen how many scenes this is gonna be but let's see how many did I end up with okay 37 total scenes so with 37 scenes I'm very excited I'm very ready to write I'm so ready to write I think all the outlining is just to get you ready to write and again so that you don't have to like pause when you're in the middle of the draft and not know where to go so in that manner I feel like this was the success I do want to go back to something I said before though I think the Caddy classic method allowed me to extrapolate scenes from there and kind of branch into these 37 scenes I have now but ultimately I think I do like save the cat better at least initially for me as someone who is not quite used to outlining yet so I really liked the build of doing save the cat and then cat eat a stick method so I'm thinking of just like making that my outlining that's them now because I do want to outline some more kin for camp NaNoWriMo coming up or re outline this story already have so I think I could use a combo yeah please do call me down below let me know what kind of outlining method you use let me know what you think of the save the cat or Caddy tastic or snowflake method and also please do give me your 15 word summary of your story yeah thank you guys so much for watching and we'll feel very soon for new video actually LCL very soon with the 24 hour read-a-thon my goodness oh my god wish me luck bye hey guys I'm Kate welcome back to my channel let me try that again now it's just hello here hello here Wow okay bless you we can go through oh can we go through did I press the wrong button I pressed the wrong button

Channel: Kate Cavanaugh

Views: 15,895

Rating: 4.9843597 out of 5

Keywords: writing, outlining, writing vlog, outlining vlog, Kate Cavanaugh, camp nanowrimo, 24 hour write a thon, first time outlining, first time writing, save the cat, 3 act 9 block 27 chapter, katytastic outlining, authortube, authortube vlog, best outlining methods, how to outline novel, how to write novel, camp nanowrimo prep, nanowrimo, snowflake method, writing life, writing advice, writing tips, writing hacks, freelance writer, freelance writing, indie author, tradpub

Id: b3WGhXBAdl0

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 20 2020