Moon Tree Brothers

Instead of writing here, or on my WordPress Blog, Savanvleck’s Weblog, I have spent my last week creating a Book Map Outline. It is yet another thing I have learned from Cheryl Klein’s Blog. Brooklyn Arden

I have spent countless hours finding a way to keep track of my book and, for some reason, this one is the one that works for me. I have added a bit to it, and I will get into how I use her Map Outline below the graph, but I have added a number system to keep track of the tension in my plot. 1 is the least tension and 10 is highest.

Now, one chapter I had going from 6 to 1, which I did not work into my graph above but it is always a good waste of my time to learn how to do something new and I have never made a graph before in Word.

This graph is for the first nine chapters of my book.

I start off with some tension, Chapter 1 is #5. This is my world set-up, what life is like for my protagonist and his two brothers, and it is the incident that moves my plot line along.
Chapter 2, a #6, is the external conflict which rises as life is thrown off course. (Hmmm,! Sort of like getting a $500 cell phone bill one day and a $1,200 propane bill the next)

I drop down to a #4 in tension for Chapter 3, for a bit of relief and then jump up to a #7 in tension. My goal here is increasing tension and relief. This is the final outline. The first one showed me that I had to go into a couple of chapters to increase the tension in the right amount.

And, about the Book Map; I am not sure how Ms. Klein exactly formats hers but table obssessed as I am, I created a table. It is just two columns but a varying number of rows. I have nine charts so far, one for each of the first nine chapters. Below the chapter title, I put my tension number.

The left column's are: Key Action, Plot Point, Protagonist development, (I have added one for Characters, to keep track of what chapters they are in. This is good to keep track of things like that someone important has not been mentioned lately.) Key Thoughts, Key Lines, Clues, Foreshadow, Red Herring. Some of these are things I have added and I have actually deleted one you might find strange.

I am not using the Plot Point. There again, Ms. Klein had excellent help on this with Brooklyn Arden: A Character-Based View of Plot. So, I am using the Protagonist development as a plot line.

We shall see.