During our pacing edit where we ADD words instead of cutting them, we also have to make sure we’ve kept to our structural goals. This requires two boring but necessary steps.
The first is taking a spreadsheet and making a list of your scenes, plot points, and chapters and taking talley of when they happen in your book.
The second is writing an outline for the book to make sure you know where you’re going. You’ll need the outline anyway when you submit to an agent and publisher.
Let’s start with the outline first, since you’ve proably done all the work already when you planned your novel.
Simply take a bullet point list and write out a single half sentence on each plot point (“Jim finds the painting”, “The Stegasaurus runs away”). Number them 1-60, write them out.
Take your bullet points the next day. Now, all you’re going to do is write narrative words to link up each plot points, usuallly starting with a description of the protagonist.
“Charlie is a nine year old boy who discovers he is a human time machine. Animals give birth to dinosaurs or space age advanced organisms around him, and he can’t figure out why at first.”
See, three plot points combined in a narrative. This should take you about three days to complete, because it’s drudgery. Ugh.
Okay, get that done.
Next, you need to take a spreadsheet, and list all of your chapters and plot points.
It will go a lot faster as soon as you learn the fast key abbreviations. CTRL+A to select all. CTRL + C is copy. CTRL + V is paste.
List all 28 chapters – 7 for act 1, 14 for act 2, 7 for act 3.
enter in to one row a list of projected word counts. The inciting incident should occur by chapter 3 or 4. No later.
Rememer everything we learned about pacing on Tuesday. You need to keep all that in mind as you put in your plot points, 3 scenes per chapter.
Now add in all your word counts in another row.
Here’s where you learn the spreadsheeet commands.
Go to the cell next to Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3.
type in the equal sign, then parentheses. =()
Ignore the emoji.
Now, add in your cell locations. You want column B row 4 added to column B row 6 and 7. here’s the formula
=(B4+B5+B6)
Some people use the sum command. I’m always finding it goes awry with me – I’m a writer, not a math major.
Just use the =(B4+B5+B6) command and adding in whatever other cells you want to add together.
The idea is to see how much of your book is where. You may think, “great! I’ve got 65,000 words!” only to find 35,000 of them are in act 1.
Oops. That means your novel is dragging big time, act 2 and three feel rushed.
This is your structural edit, and it;s important. Most writers do tend to pad Act 1, especially loading before the inciting incident. You’re now facing a GREAT deal of cutting to get your book where it needs to be.
That’s why you’re doing this phase at the BEGINNING of the structural edit. Cut every word and plot point that distorts your novel’s structure.
And now you’re going to find that you need to spend some time writing. You’ll end up cutting about 10% to 15% of your novel just trying to get ACt 1 in shape – and you’re going to spend sometime writing in ACt 2 – usually a lot.
most writers tend to leave Act 2 undeveloped. This is the red flag for publishers to reject your novel, since most of them only read act 1 – if you haven’t clearly hit act 2 by the proper spot, they already know the problems facing your book.
I’m trying to fix all that, and get your book publish ready as fast as possible.
Get these two projects done by Sunday afternoon.
Go.
