Zero to Sixty, Part II
Completing Your Index-Card Scene Map
But before we get to the main event, welcome to year three of Shelf Life.
I published the first Shelf Life article on September 8, 2020, so today marks an unbroken two-year stretch of biweekly essays. There have been 210 articles in Shelf Life prior to this one (discounting “housekeeping” posts) and a whopping 470,000 words, give or take a few. Shelf Life is now about as long as Stephen King’s The Stand (the uncut, eg, best version). The average article in Shelf Life is around 2,250 words long and is most likely to be about writing (57%), followed by publishing (22%), editing (12%), and other related topics including reading and ethics (9%).
Whether you read every week or every now and then or even if this is your first time reading, your readership means everything to me. I wouldn’t do this if you didn’t read it.
To celebrate this anniversary, here’s a list of my top-five all-time most-viewed Shelf Life articles, followed by my top-five all-time personal favorite Shelf Life articles. If you’re new to Shelf Life, or otherwise missed them, I recommend checking these out in the back catalog.
Most Viewed
Catherine’s Favorites
Now back to our regularly scheduled Shelf Living.
In Tuesday’s article, I went over a new method I’m trying for figuring out all the scenes in a novel using sixty index cards—give or take a few. I chose sixty because that’s a nice average number of scenes for a novel (or a screenplay!) to have, but it’s not a set-in-stone firm number. You could have fifty, you could have ninety—but sixty is a good target. Make sure you have extra cards (I started with 300 because that was the most cost-effective pack) because you might ruin some and you might have more than sixty scenes to write!
We left off right after Step 1, which was writing down all the scenes you already know about. When your brain runs low on scenes, move on to Step 2.
Step 2: Sort It Out
Once you’ve filled out all your cards the best you can, it’s time to put the cards in a logical order. Take your stack of cards, square it up, and start sorting. Does the second card in the stack come before or after the first one? Put them in the proper order. Does the third card in the stack go between the first two, or before or after them? Keep going till the whole stack is in an order that makes sense.
If you encounter a card that you’re not sure where to place in the plot order, set it aside into a separate stack. As you continue ordering cards you might find a place for it, or you might realize that you need to add more scenes to fit it into the plot. Or you might realize you don’t need it at all.
As you order the cards, you’ll probably notice more things that you need to add, either to existing scenes or in the form of new scenes. “They have the magic sword on this card but I didn’t introduce it on any of the previous cards!” If you need a new scene, either write a new card or write down generally what you need to add on your scratch paper. If you don’t need a new scene and just need to make sure to work whatever it is into an earlier scene, find the right place to work the detail in and add it to the Notes column of that card.
As you start getting your cards into plot order, you can start thinking about where part and chapter breaks will fall and what you see as acts one, two, and three if you’re using a three-act structure. This is where your sticky tabs (or small Post-Its) and colored dots (or markers) come into play. If you think a scene is the one to kick off a new chapter, part, or act, put a sticky tab on it and note the chapter, part, or act it starts.
If you’re putting tabs to indicate the beginning of each act, make sure the “Act I” tab is on the top left of the card, “Act II” on the top center, and “Act III” on the top right. Likewise, order any sticky tabs for chapters from left to right as best you can. This will help you quickly find your way around your manuscript when all the cards are in the box. Sticky tabs or stickers are great for this because you can peel them off if you change your mind. Markers work equally well with a correction pen handy.
Step 3: Audit Your Stack
Start cruising through your cards to identify what you’re missing. You can take a couple of passes looking for different things, or you can go slowly and audit for everything at once.
First thing to look for: Does each scene lead seamlessly to the next one, or is there a gap you need to fill? Physically, mentally, emotionally, and developmentally—is each character where they need to be by the end of one scene in order to participate in the next? If somebody was on Tattooine and somebody else was on Corsucant the last time you saw both of them but in the next scene they’re meeting on Naboo—you’re missing one or more scenes. If Jill could barely be in the same room with Jack as of their last scene together and in this one they’re grudgingly partnering on a case—what changed mentally or emotionally that Jill’s willing to work with Jack now? Something’s missing.
As you audit to make sure you can move from scene to scene, create new cards as needed or add whatever is missing to the list on your scratch paper.
Next, make sure you have all the pivotal scenes that make a plot work. Do you have an inciting incident? Do you have the story’s climax? The resolution? Does each subplot carry through to a satisfying resolution? Does each main and secondary character develop through a complete arc?
When you think you’ve got all your scenes down on cards, how many do you have? Forty? Eighty? Sixty right on the nose? However many you have, divide that number by four. In a three-act structure, the second act is generally about twice as long as the first and third, so take a look at where your act breaks fall. If you have sixty cards, you would want to be wrapping up Act I around card 15, wrapping up Act II around card 45, and finishing Act III by card 60—approximately. It doesn’t have to be exact. But if you see, for instance, that Act I is half your story and Act II and III are a quarter each, that’s a red flag you’re starting with too much exposition.
If you could use a refresher in the three-act structure, check out Middle of the Road. Importantly, your major plot points should occur toward the end of Act I (inciting incident), in the middle of Act II (story midpoint), and at the beginning of Act III (climax), or thereabouts. Eyeballing your stack of cards, are your major plot points at about the right place in the stack?
Step 4: Fill in the Blanks and Shore Up the Story
If you’ve been using scratch paper this whole time, you probably have a long and scribbly list of things you need to add to the story—scenes that are missing, for instance, but also items that need to be worked into earlier scenes. This list may or may not be complete, so read on before you start adding more scenes.
This is an excellent opportunity to work in some of the literary elements that will make your story really shine. My favorite is foreshadowing: Go backward through your cards and look for places in the earlier cards where events from the later cards can be foreshadowed. If somebody gets stabbed with a fancy dagger in scene 43, can you mention the dagger earlier in the story? (Now it’s Chekhov’s Dagger.)
Speaking of Chekhov, move forward through your cards and make sure you haven’t included any details that don’t pay off later—unless they are deliberate red herrings. Check for any dei ex machina, where an unlikely coincidence saves the day or resolves a plot blockade—if you have one, I recommend you go back to the drawing board for a different and more satisfying resolution.
To help you in the process of identifying the story flow and any missing or underdeveloped pieces, grab your markers or your dot stickers and get to color-coding. Remember how we color-coded the scenes Bob narrates with an orange dot while Fred’s scenes got a green one? Use the blank space at the top of each card on the back (above the three columns for character, location, and notes) to add color-coding. For instance, you might assign red to the main plot, blue to the first subplot, and yellow to the third subplot. Add the appropriate color dot to each card, allowing that some cards will have multiple dots—a scene can support both the main plot and a subplot (or subplots).
You’ll decide for yourself what you want to track through color-coding, but here are some items to get you started:
Narrator/point-of-view character, if the novel has more than one
Flashback or flashforward scene (scene doesn’t follow the linear timeline)
Scene is relevant to a secondary character’s development arc (different colors for different characters)
Important item or motif included in this scene (different colors for different items or motifs)
And so on. Naturally, you can’t color code for everything or you’ll have so many colors going that you won’t be able to use the code easily. And on that note, make sure you create a key to your colors and stick it in the front of your index card case or tape it to the back or something.
By now you should have a comprehensive list of what you need to add or rework. This is the second-biggest step after Step 1 and probably the most brain labor–intensive. This is the part where you either figure out everything you still don’t know, or take a leap of faith and begin drafting. In my experience, no matter how carefully I plan ahead, I end up revising that plan on the fly during the first draft. If you don’t feel compelled to get everything nailed down before you start, just place a few question-mark cards into the stack where you know you need something but you’re not sure yet what you need.
And that’s it—now you can sit down and start your draft with your box or envelope or rubber-banded stack of index cards at your elbow to guide you through the plot in a linear way. The cards are nice, too, because you can move them around if, as you’re drafting, you realize something would fit better elsewhere. Story doesn’t call for this scene yet? Tape the card to your monitor to remind you to come back to it later, or move it to the bottom of the stack.
Another great way I plan to use these is when I get writer’s block as I’m going through my plot, or get stuck on something, or just bored with a particular part. Open a fresh document, draw a card at random from part of the stack I haven’t gotten to yet, and start writing that randomly chosen scene.
I honestly keep thinking of more and more ways to use these cards. If you try out this method, let me know how it goes for you. I’m in the middle of mapping something cool and top-secret but hopefully I’ll have a card trick success story to share soon.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
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When my sister finished a draft of her memoir, I took a couple of days off work to help her get a bird's eye view of the manuscript to identify gaps and opportunities. We used index cards. We spread them over the comforter of my bed, shuffling them around, resorting, reorganizing, removing and replacing. The process helped. She never published that memoir, but in the process of querying, one agent told her she should consider rewriting it as fiction. She did. It became her first novel, which she did publish.