Oh my goodness I am really enjoying deconstructing (if that’s the right word?) my novel in order to make more sense of it. After my last video when I finished outlining the draft into four acts I decided to break it down into chapters. This was helpful as I saw how many gaps there were and also saw there was no time structure.
But I wanted to understand the gaps a bit more. The best way of doing this was to create a grid with the main relationships and themes running along the top and the chapters down the side. I ticked off where each one appeared. And discovered that despite a lot of the novel being abut my main character’s relationship with her mother and grandmother - they rarely appeared in the story!
With this information I wondered what to do next. And that’s when a friend mentioned on Instagram that she uses index cards so you can have one for each chapter - then use others to add in all the bits that are missing and move them around. So this is what I did and which is what you can see in my latest video in my novel editing journey.
(If you want to catch up and see my novel editing journey from the beginning this is the YouTube playlist).
