So yesterday I talked about doing things with loads of brightly colored pens. Things like storyboarding and plot outlining. And these are things that each person does differently.

Personally, I start with which ever thing comes to my mind first. Sometimes this is a character, sometimes it’s a scene idea, in one story’s case, it was a line of internal monologue from the main character. Generally, depending on which one comes to mind first tells me where to start.

Over on the Facebook and the Instagram from 9pm to 11pm CST I’ll be sharing images of various WIP projects that utilize each of the main forms of Story Planning that I’ll be discussing below.

These types include:
-story boarding (which I do incredibly rarely)
-something I call ‘discovery writing’
-something I think of as story bubbles but I swear has a different name with every person I’ve ever shown them to, but are useful for thinking out things
-plot lines, which in my actions are less than story boarding but more than general outlining.
-and of course, outlining, which is something that I both do well and don’t do well.

The order in which they go is usually something a bit like this:
1. Discovery writing
2. Story Bubbles
3. Plot Lines
4. Outlining
5. Storyboarding (if I do it at all until the second draft)

This week, I’ll discuss numbers 1 and 2.

First up: DISCOVERY WRITING.

What the hell is discovery writing? For me, this is where I sit down with the idea and just start writing everything that comes to mind on an idea. These thoughts are generally not in any kind of order, they’re the most rough form of writing I do. It’s simply getting as much of the rough idea down that I can. The first sample (from a series of WIPs referred to as Trio) I’ll be showing and discussing tonight has gone through a couple of rewrites and is a little more organized than they usually are. The second sample is still a bare bones discovery write and actually covers two story ideas (cheerfully known as faries and aether academy).

Now: STORY BUBBLES.

I *love* story bubbles. Story bubbles are absolutely fantastic fun. Some people refer to them as thought bubbles, some call them thought maps, but when you see them, you’ll remember them from school. I personally love them. They’re a slightly more interesting way to work out all the pieces of a world, and are quite excellent for world building. This is where I’m sitting at a table with a massive sheet of paper and an army of markers. Some of what ends up in bubbles are plot points, character development, language bits, historical distribution of information. Sometimes it’s a breakdown of departments and what they do in the case of my science fiction universe (known as the Aurora Universe). This will be, providing I remembered to bring it with me today, the samples I use for this later this evening.

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Next week on Technical Tuesday, I’ll discuss numbers 3 and 4.