People say there's two types of authors, those who plan and those who don't. In writer-language that's called "plotters" and "pantsers".
Well, obviously it's not as simple as this and there's not only black and white but a massive grey area of "plantsers" in between. Some people do a little planning, but leave gaps for surprises and imagination, some plan almost every detail but have a tiny bit of leeway left for changes. Some people, like one of my friends, swap their writing style between books, planning one while completely pantsing another one. Whatever your style might be though, it's not set in stone and this is an important lesson to learn.
I used to be a pantser. I never made a plan for anything. I had an idea, a rough setting, a few characters, and then I started writing. Which most of the times ended with me getting lost somewhere in the middle-section of the story. There's at least a dozen unfinished manuscripts on my hard drive. Abandoned because I had no idea what was supposed to happen next and where the story was going.
Then, I tried Camp NaNoWriMo last year and because it's only a month and you have this pressure of reaching a certain set goal (in my case it was 30,000 words), I looked into outlining. And I found something which I will never ever want to live without again: beat sheets!
Beat sheets are the most basic form of novel-planning. By trying to plot your story along a set structure, you will learn a lot about your own writing. For example why you always got stuck in the middle. From experience there is no one-size-fits all beat sheet and I have used several different ones to outline different stories, sometimes even mixing and matching them up.
One very popular method is the "Save the Cat" method. Anyone who has ever spent even a day in the writingcommunity on twitter knows that "Save the Cat" was originally developed for screen plays and then adapted to novel-writing. There is a book you can buy, but I don't own it, so I can't say whether it helps or not. But there are also free ressources online which are extremely helpful for someone like me who is a little bit obsessed with numbers and wordcount.
Beat sheets tell you how many words or pages each part of the book needs to get the pacing right. For me, they are a true life saver.
The last website has several other types of beat sheets as well, from "Hero's Journey" to "Romance".
Finally, there's one more page I want to point you to, if you think you might need even more guidance than these worksheets provide. The first beat sheet I ever used was the one page novel spreadsheet and it's a great resource even though it doesn't work for every single type of story.
This page also has a massive amount of fabulous and helpful resources for character development, world building and whatever your little writing heart desires. If you have never tried outlining before and - like me - got stuck on the way: Try some of these templates out!
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