NANOWRIMO PREP: Outlining with Scrivener and Save the Cat!

hello everybody welcome back to my channel my name is Natalia Lee and I'm the author of the young adult novels song the Dryad right back there it released on October 20th so just about a week and a half ago I want to say I am extremely excited about the love and support it received so thank you so much to everybody who has picked up a copy if you haven't got yours yet and you would like to you can buy it through Amazon Barnes Noble iBooks books-a-million and other major book retailers so I am going to be doing NaNoWriMo this year obviously as I had talked about in many of my past videos and I have had a few requests to show you guys how I'm outlining my new novel and how I'm using Scrivener to outline said novels so I am going to be popping kind of back and forth between chatting with you and showing you my computer screen so that you can see how I actually set up a Scrivener document so without further ado let's get started [Music] so the first thing we're going to do if you don't have Scrivener already and you want to Scrivener because that is what I am going to be using is you can get it at literature and lot a dot-com backslash Scrivener so this is what their page looks like I actually got Scrivener for 50% off when I won NaNoWriMo years ago but this is where you can get it they have Scrivener for Mac and they have it for Windows I believe let's see you can download a free trial yeah so here we can see that they have Mac they have Windows they have all kinds of stuff so this is where you can get Scrivener if you want it because this is what I will be using today all right so if you download Scrivener and you have Scrivener the first thing you'll need to do when starting a new project is decide what type of project you want to use or what type of project you're going to be writing so for me I'm going to go down here to fiction and you can see right here Jamie Gold's romance template this is actually something that I found online and I downloaded so you can actually go online and find different Scrivener templates to download and load you know into your Scrivener in order to have like beat sheets and other organization but for the sake of this one I am just going to select fiction and then I am going to select novel you can also do a novel with parts or a short story but I'm just gonna select novel let's see and then down here save as I'm going to say what is this demo file that's what I'm going to call it I'm going to save it on my desktop alright let's create this new novel here we go so Scrivener will tell you a little bit about it but I'm just going to ignore all of this because I don't need any of this so we're going to jump right into this manuscript right here and this is not going to be a Scrivener walkthrough I do have like a basic Scrivener video that I did a year and a half ago maybe so I will link that in the cards up above so this is not a Scrivener tutorial I can do a more in-depth tutorial this is just simply going to show you how I am outlining my new book using Scrivener all right here we are in my demo file I am going to rename the manuscript and I'm going to call it outline that works well for me then you can see that we have a chapter and a scene and if I was going to add a new chapter up here I would add a new folder let's call it chapter 2 and I click on outline you can see now I have chapter in chapter 2 but that's not actually how I'm going to do it so we have my outline and what I'm doing right now what I'm doing for this book is different than what I've done for pass books because I picked up this book I save the cat writes a novel by Jessica Brody I got this at Barnes & Noble a couple of days ago everybody's been talking about it so I wanted to get my own copy and I've been really enjoying it so far so what I'm working on like as far as my skill in my craft moving forward is still strengthening plot and then making sure that I'm upping tension making sure that there are enough problems for the characters to be facing so with each new book I write there's like a new thing that I'm trying to focus on or a new thing that I'm trying to tackle so this time around I am using this book I think I'm going to do a full review on it when I finish reading it and using it but it has a beat sheet in it so there are 15 beats or like plot points that are in this book that I want to hit with my new novel so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the very first beat and let's see the first beat is called opening image so I'm gonna hop back over here now to my outline so this chapter I'm going to name opening image so I know what beat that is and then down here let's see I like to click on how do I set this up I like to do because you can click here and type like this is what happens here but you can't see everything if you type a lot so I like to change the view from cork board to one yeah I like to change it from cork board to outline so now you can see the scene at the synopsis the label and the status so maybe for the opening image opening image is only one scene long and that's something that the book taught me so I have opening image seen one and then I would write what happens under the area that says synopsis but for the sake of this video I am just going to write the very like basic summary so a before snapshot of your hero and their world before snapshot of hero and their world so that's what we're looking for for the opening image it's only one scene you know of course you can change the label over here what I like to do is change label to day of the week because I always plot out exactly what day everything is happening on that's why we have day of the week here and then I would have like Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday all laid out but again this is not a tutorial on how to do that I'm just letting you know how I like to set it up and then of course first draft and I would change this as I'm like editing and going through so there we go we have my opening image now we're going to move on to the next part so chapter two I'm going to rename as theme stated you know I'm gonna go up here add a new form to see new form a new file scene 1 again so I break each of these beats or plot points down into individual scenes so I really do pretty in-depth outlining because I want to know exactly where my scene breaks are what my characters are doing with their doing next etc etc so theme stated is essentially a statement made by a character that hints out with the heroes arc will be when we're going over here at the synopsis you know on my document if I was like okay opening image you know I would type here you know for example like Charlotte is walking through the forest and sees a fairy right and that's not what's going to happen but that might be something that I would write there and what's nice about the outline view is that the synopsis will grow and grow and grow so you can read all of it whereas if you're up here in the corkboard view you cannot read everything see how it just cuts off here so I don't like that I like being able to see everything so that's why I keep it on outline so now we have our opening image you can click this little arrow scene 1 and then I would actually go into that scene 1 and right you know Charlotte is walking through the woods and sees a fairy the fairy is pretty ok like I would actually write that scene there so this is just to give me an idea of what I'm supposed to be writing and then during NaNoWriMo or whenever you're writing this novel I would actually click OK so I'd say scene 1 here's what I'm supposed to be doing a before snapshot of the hero in their world here's what I will be writing and then I'll go in here and I'll actually write that scene down alright so now let's go back to outline let's go ahead and add a new folder this one is going to be called right this is the set up again add another scene to it seeing one oops but this set up could potentially take a few scenes so maybe I'll go ahead and add another scene to it and call that scene 2 then when I go to set up I'll say alright and see one set up character's life before and Changez right because when we're writing a story we have a character that has like a before you know their life before and then there will be an inciting incident and then there's the story after so this might take a couple of scenes to do you know a couple of scenes to set up the character's life maybe that even takes a couple of chapters but remember we're still not out the catalyst yet we're still not at that inciting incident so we don't want this to take too long all right the fourth one my favorite probably this is going to be the catalyst this is going to be the the inciting incident or life changing let's spell that right changing event that pushes hero into the new world so this is the thing that happens that changes the hero's world forever for example if we use Harry Potter I would say the inciting incident is when he learns that he's a wizard and learns that Hogwarts exists right because he's living a very mundane drab life with the Dursleys before he finds out about Hogwarts and gets his letter afterward after that inciting incident he goes to Hogwarts and suddenly the real story begins so that inciting incident or the catalyst is the thing that changes everything for our character once they experience that inciting incident they cannot go back to their real world now they might have some hesitation to step into their new world and that could be that will actually be the next plot point that's the debate and in short again I'm always breaking this down into scenes you know some will have many many scenes that some will only have a couple of scenes it just depends the scene one character is hesitant to in turn the world the purpose of this beat is to show the hero's reluctance to change so here we have our character saying okay I'm you know maybe I'm comfortable in the world the way it is and they're struggling to know if they should move forward or not but of course in order for there to be a story they have to move on so I'm not going to do all of these but this is kind of how I'm setting it up this time around so I have my main outline you can see that I have all of these beats or plot points that I'm going to hit along the way and then each of those is broken down into different scenes now I am not sure how I'm going to tackle chapters because this is different for me actually plotting out beeps is different than what I did last time because when I was writing song the Dryad I plotted out chapters and then scenes within those chapters so my idea right now is that I am just going to plan on different beats and scenes and then as I'm writing those scenes I can find where a good stopping point is for a chapter maybe I'm really upping the tension and then I want to cut off the chapter to make readers when I turn the page and find out what happens next so I'm not absolutely certain how that's going to work because this is a little bit new for me but this is what I'm using as of this time so that's how I'm doing the outline we can also hop over here into characters let's see I will add a template I'll add a character sketch so now we have I don't know what oh there we go so now we have you know up here I could say I'm using Charlotte as my example Charlotte Barclay she is our heroine of the story excuse me occupation she is a student slash violin that I spelled that wrong violin teacher so this is what I would use to kind of get some ideas for my characters again you can also be using other methods if you have my prepped / workbook there is a bunch of like character exercises and character worksheets that you can fill out that also go into depth just the Scrivener one does let's see you can also go to places this is something that I always like to do and then do a setting sketch name of setting so Charlotte if you haven't read something to drive yet she lives in a little color out of town called Mapleton so maybe this would be my Mapleton Colorado page put in a bunch of information so that I know what's going on and then you know if you ever need to jump back and say oh you know what was that characters you know I color you can quickly go to your character sketch or hey exactly where was the library you know in my town you can go to your settings sketch and figure it all out so Scrivener is great for organizing lots of things now I didn't use to use Scrivener for NaNoWriMo I used to want a very like free-form NaNoWriMo experience so I would just use Microsoft Word but I have gotten to a point where I want to be writing the correct story the first time around was song the dry odd I was writing the wrong story the first time I threw away forty nine thousand words of the fifty thousand that I wrote for Nano so I essentially spent NaNoWriMo learning what story I did not want to tell and that was helpful but it was also time-consuming and it pushed out the process of writing that first draft so with this next novel I am wanting to make sure that I'm on the right path and I can never be certain to that you know when I go back through and I'm editing and changing things there will always be something that's wrong there will always be something that I have to change or that I have to make better in some way so I'm not nervous about that so much as I don't want to just be writing willy-nilly you know some people that works really well for me it does not I'm not a Pancer at all whatsoever I need to know what my character is doing when they're doing it why they're doing it and what's going to become of them because they did that thing and this method is really working for me so far again I'm getting all of these beats out of this book save the cat writes novel I know that there's a screenplay edition that's like the original one I never read that so this is my first version of this book really enjoying it we'll be doing a review on it like when I am done reading it probably in December maybe because I will be using this throughout the month of November during the Anna rhyme oh so that is the basic way that I am setting up my Scrivener document moving forward for NaNoWriMo alright guys so that is it for now it is a pretty simple setup the way that I'm doing it this is my first time using this setup I did make an outlining video I don't know last year sometime yeah almost a year ago or maybe over a year ago over a year ago wow I've been on YouTube longer than I realized sometimes so probably like a year and a half ago before I had finished the first draft of selling the Dryad I think so quite a while ago I made an outlining video and I'm kind of building on the way that I use to outline so I am still breaking everything down into individual scenes figuring out everything but the only big change this time is that instead of doing it chapter by chapter I'm going beat by beat so that I can make sure that I'm hitting you know all of those like emotional turning points that are typically needed to tell a good story whether you're doing a screenplay a short story a novel like whatever you're writing there are certain like things that you're supposed to be hittin along the way so that the reader or the viewer is being carried along on this emotional experience with you and your characters so that is what I am working on I will likely be letting you guys know maybe throughout the month of November or maybe when I do like a NaNoWriMo wrap-up and let you know how I did I'll probably be like touching back on how this method worked for me how this outlining method either was better than my old one or didn't work quite as well as my old one but I'm not sure how that's going to be so this is how I'm doing it now it's simple it's to the point I am currently working on the debate beat plot point so you know I'm setting up my Scrivener document right now just like I was showing you how to do yours that's what I'm doing with mine I'm going beat by beat scene by scene figuring everything out now keep in mind though that I have been doing outlining and brainstorming before this so I am NOT coming into this with zero ideas I'm coming into this having filled out my prepped over workbook I'm coming into this having brain storms for a month you know beforehand and that doesn't mean that that's what you have to do but that's what I have to do it takes me a long time to gather up like all of my ideas and then start figuring out how to tie all of those ideas together and make them work in a cohesive storyline but however works for you like maybe you're coming into this with no idea what to write this could potentially still help you because the very first chapter in here is about hero like setting up your hero and the qualities and attributes they need to have in order you know for the reader or the viewer to want to follow them on their journey so you could use this method even if you have no idea what you want to write again you have to go and pick up this book to learn even more about all of the different beats there are 15 of them I will be doing a review on this book now I'm just repeating myself everybody thank you so much for joining me today NaNoWriMo is starting this Thursday I'm filming this on a Tuesday it's almost here guys it is happening so I will be doing a live stream here on my youtube channel on November 1st at 6 p.m. Central Standard Time I will be doing that with Brooke Passmore and Mandy Lynn we are going to be sprinting on November 1st we will also be sprinting on November 11th and November 30th so kind of like breaking up the month into these three words sprint live streams to help all of us and help you guys stay on track catch up with any words that you have fallen behind on and just kind of hold everybody accountable so I'm excited for that I will see you guys hopefully this Thursday for the first day of NaNoWriMo and I hope that you enjoy a Halloween or so and if you are celebrating all right everybody have a wonderful rest of your day thank you so much for joining me and I will see you in my next video Stace by [Music]

Channel: Natalia Leigh

Views: 12,322

Rating: 4.9365077 out of 5

Keywords: nanowrimo, nano prep, outline, outlining, scrivener, outlining with scrivener, nanowrimo 2018, nano, nano 2018, preptober, save the cat, beat sheet, save the cat! writes a novel, plotting a book, plotting a novel, how to outline a book, how to outline a novel, how to plot a story, how to outline a story, writing tips, writing advice, best writing tips, best writing advice, how to write your first book, outlining with save the cat, save the cat beat sheet, authortube, authorlife, vlog

Id: NLgGewdaTgw

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 30 2018