We Call This Writing

Spreadsheets Are Your Friends

SPREADSHEETS ARE YOUR FRIEND

Mystery has been my Wattpad game thus far and the art of mystery and the art of planning go hand in hand. Mystery is a genre that relies on clues being slept for the characters and the reader and the hints at what's coming can't exist if the author has no idea what's coming, either.

You've heard about the age-old battle of the 'pantsers' vs. the 'plotters'. These phrases drive me crazy. I hate them and I hate the endless debates. There's a way to mix both, but at the end of the day, plotters get stuff done. The glory of 'pantsing' is in the spontaneity, but it can lead to dead ends, meandering paths, great character development, but no structure. For a very long time I was all about the organic process and letting characters run amok. I finished zero stories that way. This is the first year I've really, truly started planning and I'm almost done my second 80,000+ word draft this year.

The thing about planning is, it's work. It's not fun, necessarily. The plan sometimes changes and the abandoned chunk of the plan feels like wasted effort. It takes time to think about.

But, man, is it awesome to sit down and write and know exactly what needs to happen in your chapter and not have to think what happens next? While staring blankly at the screen for three hours.

Now that I've made my case for the transformative power of planning... how do you do it? I'm going to begin with this:

If you've read Natalie's Diary, you can clearly tell that this is decidedly not ND's outline. This is from another project that may or may not end up on Wattpad or a local bookshop shelf in the distant future. Who knows. This is a pretty extensive outline, but this could be more or less than you personally need for your projects. We'll go over some features of this particular spreadsheet.

Days

In the case of this example, each day is divided into it's own 'chapter' no matter how long it is. The days are important for tracking the holidays and how many days it's been since a pretty significant event. Natalie's Diary should have a similar column in its spreadsheet because when writing a mystery in the context of a bunch of high school kids, whether or not they have school is pretty important. So, depending on your story, the day of the week things happen on could be significant. Charting it helps a lot to make sense of that.

Summary

As you can see, these summaries are pretty brief in nature. You'll also notice that these are colour-coded. The colours represent the first act and the second act (the third act is not included in the image). The red summary indicates the dead centre of the story, midway through the second act. I based my colour-coding and three-act structure on these fancy infographs below.

EDIT: haaaaa I forgot to add these before. Why did I do that? They're so helpful

Characters

This was honestly more for my quick reference than anything else. Knowing who's in a chapter plus the vague summary helps jog my memory in a flash. Up to you whether or not it's an important enough column.

Word Count

Not necessarily important to all, but for this particular project, it was important to me that each act fall within a certain range of word count.

Structure Points

There's that utilitarian column, full of boring English class terms. This column can be helpful when developing a plot in the first place. It helps to give a sense of timing and pace. If you have 50,000 words before your inciting incident happens, you might be in trouble.

Injuries

Okay, so this one is kind of comical. This particular character hurt himself a lot. The problem for me became that I had him with stitches for entirely too long, or forgot that he had limited movement at another point. It became important to keep track of how long it would take for his injuries to heal so I could remember when to keep mentioning them and when they would've been healed. If you are like me and enjoy thrashing your characters, I highly recommend this before they're walking around on crutches for only three days after breaking a leg. However, you might want a similar column for things such as the cycle of the moon, if you're writing werewolf stories. 

For your planning pleasure, I'm including a link to a similar spreadsheet in Google Sheets if anyone wants to steal it so you don't have to make your own. You can find the url in the blurb of this book or in the comments section below. 

This has been an introduction to planning with the aid of spreadsheets. 

PS for those keeping score, didn't do a draw for this lesson because I posted the first few chapters in such quick succession there weren't commenters to pull from. Next chapter, though! Comment and get a chance to be featured in the next chapter!