So for the last couple nights I've been plotting. In my Influence-notebook—I'm going to various coffeeshops, pubs, parks, fountains, etc. and hand-writing the whole thing before moving on to digital; it's just easier to scribble notes and ideas down and sketch out layout ideas on paper than in Textpad). Anyway, in my Influence-notebook, I've layed out three columns: Page, Time, and Location.
These let me easily delineate story-pacing (both general flow and placement of anticipation/reveals). I can say something like:
| PAGE: | TIME: | LOCATION: |
| 14-15 | 1970; Junior High | Pemberly; The sitting room to caverenous walk-in closet; A rousing game of spin the bottle—Darcy has just spun Miss Elizabeth Bennett; her distaste is facially evident. But peer pressure being what it is... Etc. |
| 16 | 1991 | Pemberly; The same closet; on the floor—Darcy chides Elizabeth for her childish prejudices; and Elizabeth laughs at Darcy's long-past discomfiture at her visible rejection of him. Things get steamy. Naturally. |
I wasn't sure how well this would work and it's been tough essentially pre-writing every page before I get to write it for reals, but in the end, it should make my scripting task much easier.
Annnnnd, it's revealed the areas I'll need to research before I can even hope to write a certain segment realistically. I had gotten fifty pages of good plotting accomplished in this manner when I came to a section that I absolutely needed to research before I could touch it. And since I can't know how many pages to devote to this section, it's rather hard to proceed. In order to continue plotting to some degree, I've temporarily abandoned my more rigourous plotting for a more general order of events. And since my research begins tonight, I hope to be able to accurately plot those pages by week's end. I hope!
[[ Update: I have no idea why the table is so poorly rendered (esp. in IE). I've tried numerous fixes. One worked but destroyed the post in IE for baffling reasons. So, I've left it and hope the reader will be understanding. ]]
