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STORYBOARDING

"Storyboarding" usually means arranging a sequence of images for a film or
commercial. But you can storyboard a novel also, and it can be a helpful way
to organize the plot.

That's because we don't normally *think* plot. We have an idea for a story
(immigrant boy founds family dynasty in Nevada wilderness) and a random
assortment of mental images (encounter with a grizzly bear, wild ride to
rescue son from kidnappers, gorgeous blonde swimming nude in icy stream,
showdown with eastern gangsters wanting land for casino). How do we get from
these fragments to a coherent plot?

Writing a letter to yourself may help, but first try this: Take a stack of
3x5 cards and jot down an image or scene on each one, just in the order the
ideas occur to you. It might look something like this:

--------------------------------------
Jesse rides into town, confronts Caleb Black about his fraudulent
mining-shares deal. Caleb denies everything, threatens to shoot Jesse if he
talks about it.
--------------------------------------

When you have five or ten or twenty such cards, lay them out in the sequence
you envisage for the story. You certainly don't have a card for each scene in
the novel, but you have the scenes that your subconscious seems to want to
deal with.

You also have numerous gaps. How do you get Jesse from his silver mine in
Nevada to the deck of the Titanic? How does Caleb get in touch with the three
hired killers from San Francisco? How does Jesse's grandson respond to the
first offer from the gangster syndicate that wants to build a casino on the
site of the old mine?

Now you turn your thoughts to just those gaps, and new ideas occur to you.
That means more cards. Maybe some of the new ideas are better than the
original ones, so some of the old cards go in the trash. New characters
emerge to fulfill functions in the story. Your research into Nevada history
suggests still more scenes which might go into this or that part of the
novel; still more cards go into your growing deck.

The story may eventually end up as a series of flashbacks, but for now stick
to straight chronological order. Maybe the whole story occurs during a
three-hour siege of a secluded mansion; maybe it stretches across a century
and a continent. Whatever the "real time" of your story, you may see that the
cards clump naturally around certain periods of the plot and you see no need
for events to fill in the gaps. That's fine; maybe you've found the natural
divisions between chapters or sections of the story.

Keep asking yourself *why*. Why Nevada, why mining, why a gorgeous naked
blonde? Don't keep a scene in your storyboard unless you can justify it as a
way to dramatize a character's personality, to move the story ahead, to lend
verisimilitude. If you absolutely must have a scene in which Jesse's true
love Sophia goes skinnydipping in an icy creek and then nearly drowns, what
good will the scene do for the story?

Once you have at least the main sequence of events clearly mapped out on your
cards, you can begin to transfer them to a more manageable synopsis or
outline. More about that in a later posting.