First of all, I won NaNo and with that out of the way, let’s go on to more interesting stuff.

Before I started NaNo, I thought my main project would be the AtoZ Challenge entries. In fact this was what convinced me to try the challenge this year, since I thought my novelette wasn’t enough of a project to cover NaNo. Well, it was true, I wouldn’t have had enough of words with just the novelette, but as it turned out, I wrote zero entries for the AtoZ and instead I’ve practically finished the novelette. You never know what to expect, eh?

That wasn’t the only surprise. Another one was the way I went about revising (well, rewriting) the novelette.
Give in to the Feeling was the last short story I wrote before starting working to the trilogy and I wrote it the same way I’d always written short stories up to that point: on the fly. I would get the idea, I’d define the beginning, the end and the climax without ever taking any notes, then I would just write and see what happened. I’d revised the short story typically a couple of times, refining action and characters’ motives and that was it.
Working to a trilogy taught me all kinds of stuff, first thing being I could never work a trilogy the same way I worked short stories. So I learned to plan a lot more. I learned to use writers’ tools, because it takes years to work to a trilogy and you can’t rely on just memory. You also can’t rely on just intuition, but need to really think out characters’ relationships and reasons… not to mention that you have a number of characters and they all need their action and reason, all of which are related. In short, it’s a mess you can’t sort out just by thinking it out. At least, that doesn’t work for me.
As I like to say, you don’t think you need writers’ tools, until you need them. And as I wrote the trilogy I discovered I definitely needed writers’ tools. A lot of them.

I still thought I could manage a short story just fine, without too much fuss. Working on the fly as I used to.
Those were the last famous words of mine.

First, I reread the story which I hadn’t touched in five years. Second, I started pulling off my hair. Third, I thought there must be a more effective way to go about it, so I broke the story down to episode level and see what I didn’t’ like.
Two things stood out: It needed to be Susie’s story more than it did and Michael’s role needed to be clearer.
With this in mind I first rewrote the synopsis, episode by episode. It still didn’t clear out. That’s when I pulled out my writer’s tools.

One thing I knew: I needed to clarify the characters’ reasons first of all to myself. I started doing that by using Svenja NaNoWriMo Spreadsheet. Yes, granted, this is mainly for the word count, but there are a few more spreadsheets attached to it that deal with story plotpoints and character building. What I like about these spreadsheets is that you need to be very essential and therefore very specific. You are allowed only few words to describe anything, both about the characters and the story. I filled out the story structure spreadsheet and one spreadsheet for each character, and that gave me a first idea what I wanted to strengthen and even drop in the characters’ personality and reasons in the new draft.

That’s how I realised I needed to slightly change the plot in order to strengthen Susie’s position and to give a reason for Michael to even be in the story. That also meant Simon’s and Blood’s conflict needed to be stronger and clearer.
I started working to the plot with a template I found on Jami Gold‘s site, the Six Stages Plot Structure. This uses the classic narrative structure in a very essential way. You’re supposed to use it to outline the story, I actually used it to outline each character’s arc, so I ended up with four spreadsheet. Of course, Susie’s arc, being the backbone of the novelette, was the main structure of the story itself, while the other spreadsheets each outlined stories that started far before the events in Give in to the Feeling. This allowed me to get a wider idea of the situation and to explore character’s lives and reasons before the story started.
On Jami Gold’s site I also found the Save the Cat Boards Beat Sheet . This file works with the classic story structure too, but they go into more details about every single part of story. This allowed me to get deeper into the plot while also trying to mix the four different outlines I had into just one story breakdown. It wasn’t as easy as one might think, but having a structure to guide me was a great help.

Finally, I wrote a chapter-by-chapter outline, with each chapter divided into episodes (each episode with its own POV). I still didn’t follow it religiously when I wrote. I used all the episodes, but the order and some of the character’s reactions still morphed while writing.
I suppose I’ll always be a planning pantser.

So, there you have it. I think Give in to the Feeling is a better, stronger, more cohesive story than it used to be, and part of it depends on my new writing technique, which also included writers’ tool.

What about you? Have you ever used writer’s tools and templates? Were they useful to you? If not, why do you think they weren’t?