 Hello, my name's Jackie, welcome back to my channel and in this video I'm going to attempt to continue plotting my books from Nanarana using the Save the Cat method. Now if you saw my last video, which I will link somewhere, you will know that my intention was to take a few days to really focus on the Save the Cat exercises in more detail because last time, which was one week ago now, I was sitting down trying to do it sort of all on the spot, and what I realized was my ideas are in such a fetal state, they have so little development that I really struggled to get beyond what I already knew. So for the three ideas I'm playing with I have a general concept, for a couple of them I have scenes, but that's it, and that meant when I started trying to use the Save the Cat beat sheet to map things out, I got to the midpoint, not even in some books, some of them I just had the opening scene and that was it and I didn't know where to go from there. So my plan was to spend a few days delving in and out of the exercises and continue working on the book and letting it marinate a bit so that when I came back to do the rest of the beat sheet it would be more developed and hopefully I'd have a stronger starting point. The problem is that it has been a week and I have done nothing. I have had a really crazy week at work, I have had a time to catch up on because I was away for four days because I was in Istanbul for a conference, so it's just been this crazy week of catching up, plus I've got two new team members who I'm trying to train along with the other members of my team. There was an announcement relating to Brexit because we're in a financial company so there were just quite a lot of things happening this week and I meant that every time I got home I just crashed. I had nothing left for these projects. Until today when I realized that it's October 20th which means Nana Raimo is 11 days away and I still have no idea what I'm gonna write and even if I pick one of the ideas at the moment I would probably write the opening scene and just hope for the best. Which was not what I had planned. I mean this is my first time doing Nana Raimo. I really don't want to fail. I know that if you plot out a book before you get started you've got a far greater chance of succeeding. If you have all of the key scenes listed out in front of you then when you sit down to write you'll know exactly what you're writing rather than googling or twiddling your thumbs or staring at a blank screen and suddenly your writing time for the day is done and you are 1667 words behind your target. And honestly I don't see myself getting to a stage where I have a fully plotted book by the end of the month and I'm not sure what to do about it. I mean I still want to try Nana Raimo but I really don't want to fail. I don't know what this means. I mean to other people do other people have everything planned out before they go into Nana Raimo or do people go into Nana Raimo being like totally okay with failing because I don't want to like I don't want to commit to doing something and then not do it. So it's causing a little bit of anxiety for me. But anyway the focus of today's video is just finishing the save the cat process. So last week what I did was my logline. I picked genres for each of my ideas. I did the who is it about. So adjectives to describe the main character. Oof I can't remember off the top of my head. The main character, the antagonist and the problem they're facing I think. And I attempted to do the beat sheet. Today I want to finish the beat sheet so I have all 15 story beats that need to be covered. I also want to try the storyboarding exercise. However the storyboarding exercise relies on having completed the beat sheet because you go from 15 story beats to having a storyboard that has 40 different scenes. So I have no idea how this is gonna go but it should be interesting. So I'm back. It's been about three hours since I last turned off the camera and I am pleasantly surprised with my progress which I was not expecting. When I started to record today I honestly thought that I wouldn't get anywhere with this process that I didn't have enough of an idea and that meant I would never be able to fill out these beats. And part of me was thinking maybe I wouldn't have anything done in time for NaNoWriMo and I wouldn't do it. And that's not to say that I'd stop writing entirely. Like I still think this is a valuable process but I was thinking I wouldn't be ready in time for NaNoWriMo and I would just continue plotting and maybe start writing something later in the month or even December. However I have made progress so there is hope once again. So what I have done so far is I have mapped out the story beats for my three ideas and all of them have stuff. So if I show you my notebook you'll see the pages from last week when I first tried doing this they're only half full. Each of the ideas only has really an opening scene. A couple of them have some ideas going up to the midpoint. There's nothing in the second act for anything. However if you look at the stuff I've written today you'll see there's just so much more. So I did everything in the same order that I did last week. So I started with powerless then did Vampire Board games then did happily ever after. And if you look at my notepad so this might not seem like a lot to you but considering I had like a couple of images from dreams I'm really happy with this. So you'll see powerless I've got three pages of very messy notes. This is where Vampire Board games starts and again I think I've got two and a half pages this time. And then happily ever after which is clocking in at two pages. Now these are not complete outlines by any measure. There are still question marks in there. There are still blank spaces in there for beats I couldn't think of. However I'm surprised that I have so much there like I could actually write several thousand words on this. Maybe not fifty thousand but we'll see how I go. So yeah all in all I'm really happy with the process and think that if you're following the Save the Cat method and following Blake Snyder's beat sheet then just take a little bit of extra time give yourself give yourself some days to think about it. And rather than writing out everything on a single page upfront which is what I did. So I had opening image two lines, theme two lines, set up two lines, catalyst two lines and so on. I had everything listed in the margins of one page and I found that quite restrictive last week. It didn't give me a lot of time for a lot of time for imagination whereas this time I just wrote down one beat at a time and each of these have quite a bit on set up. So I think yeah Vampire Board games and Vampire Board games has a whole page of set up written down. Powerless has about three quarters of a page and Happily Ever After has a half a page and I think just spending that extra time there made everything else flow much more easily and the same thing when I got to each beat I just spent all the time I needed on that beat and yeah I'm really happy with how much I've got. From here I'm gonna continue working on this. There's actually a live author tube chat that Kate Kavanaugh's doing on her channel like in one minute and 11 seconds. So from here I'm going to continue working on this. There's actually a live video happening on Kate Kavanaugh's channel. It's an author tube chat about Nana Rhymo so I'll have that on the background as I continue working on this. It is starting in one minute so I'll quickly finish up here and from here I think I'll check in tomorrow to continue with the storyboarding part of the exercise so I'll see you then. So it's the next day and I'm back to continue with the Save the Cat process. So what I've done so far is bloodline, genre, who's it about and beat sheet and the next step is to do a storyboard. Now to do this you start with a blank bit of paper, a pin-up board or a wall and you divide it into four horizontal lines. These lines are Act 1, the first half of Act 2, the second half of Act 2 and Act 3. Then you start mapping out your story by adding blank story beats to this so they include your opening image, catalyst, debate, break into two, B story, fun and games, midpoint, bad guys close in, all is lost, dark night of the soul, break into three, finale and final image. And when you're done you might have something like this. I don't know how well the camera is going to pick up the yellow. Let's try this one which has green post-its. Looks like it's still as bad but anyway each of these post-its is one of the story beats. Some of them are still blank just because I'm not sure what goes there and the gaps in between them are because these 15 story beats aren't all of the scenes that will go into your movie or in this case book. Instead you should have about 40 scenes so 10 per line. Now I don't know how well you can see this but I'm not going to fit 10 post-its per line. I really need a bigger bit of paper but I will try my best. So I don't know if you can see this on the storyboards I was holding up but on each post-it or each card Blake recommends including the name of the scene and emotional change that happens in the scene and the main conflict in the scene. An example he gives of this is a coffee shop day Bob confronts Helen about her secret. Bob starts out hopeful ends up disappointed so that's the emotional change and Bob wants to know a secret Helen can't tell him that's the conflict. Now I'm struggling with this a little bit because I've just been thinking of events and not so much the emotional change and I don't know if it's realistic to expect an emotional change in your characters every single scene and it really makes me want to go and watch some of the films especially the ones he refers to in this to see if that happens like in miscongeniality does every single scene have an emotional change or is it just the key ones same thing with legally blonde and I'm picking these lighter films because I'd expect there'd be less emotional turmoil than something like a drama but this is what he says to do so let's do it. So since it didn't look like my phone was picking up the boards very well I thought I'd give you a closer look so this is what I've got so far for powerless and this one here is what I've got so far for vampire board games. So I've now completed all of the exercises from Save the Cat that are part of the preparation stage so everything you do before you start writing as I mentioned in my last video the last couple of chapters of Save the Cat and more diagnosis tools I feel like I felt they would be really useful once you have something written and you can go back and diagnose why it's not working so when it comes to what to do before you start writing the exercises were your logline picking a genre knowing who it's about doing the 15 story beats and doing the board. Now I wouldn't say I'm finished but I thought since I was already filming today it was a good opportunity to give you my thoughts on the process all in all I loved it I think this is so helpful I just wish I had a little bit more time before November so I could so I could just spend a bit more time thinking about these stories and coming up with interesting ideas for scenes so I've got the the board for each of my stories with me so this is powerless this is vampire board games and this very empty one is happily ever after now when you're done with the storyboarding you're supposed to have 40 scenes so 10 on each row I don't have anywhere near that on the two that are more fleshed out so that's powerless and vampire board games I have about 15 and one of the reasons for that is I haven't spent a lot of time on this I did this for maybe half an hour after work yesterday and today I've been doing it for maybe an hour so there hasn't been a lot of time put into this yet so I wouldn't expect to see a full 40 scenes however the other thing that I found a little bit challenging was that a number of the beats in Blake's beat sheet seemed to flow really nicely one from the other now if you saw my take off your pants video you might remember that one of the issues I had with that plotting method was that it felt very much like something happened and then something happened and then something happened it was like random event after random event there wasn't clear cause and effect it wasn't clear how one scene triggered or flowed into the next whereas in this beat sheet there are there are a few examples where that is the case so you have your catalyst which kicks off the story you have your debate which is when the hero is either thinking about you know whether or not I should do this or whether or not I can do this or might be the audience questioning whether or not if I can do this so that clearly flows on from the catalyst the next one is break into two so breaking into act two and that's the point when the character decides no I am doing this and steps forward into their mission so those three when I was mapping out these storyboards for me they're just bam bam bam it's one after the other so if I'm adding another seven scenes beyond that to that act of the story I'm not sure where they go I think seven scenes of setup which would all come before that are probably a bit much but I don't know unless we have like multiple debates or something or I suppose a multi-scene catalyst I'm not really sure how you would expand that into ten scenes and that was the case with the end of act two as well so you have the all is lost moment the dark night of the soul which pretty much happened at the exact same time I mean as far as page counts go you've got all is lost on page 75 remember that these page counts of writing a script not for a novel but they give you a sense of where they should fit proportionately in the plot so that's 75 pages out of 110 so all is lost is on page 75 and the dark night of the soul is 75 to 85 so they could actually be part of the same scene and then break into three so the break into act three is when the hero realizes something or someone helps them and they get out of that dark night and move into the next thing so what I found is that I had ideas for how one event would trigger another and I really liked that snowball effect but I wasn't sure how to add extra scenes without slowing it down but what I have now is not going to be a book so we'll see how I go with a few more days of thinking the other challenge I had with this process which I also mentioned in the part one video is that it did feel a bit rushed and I don't think that's just because I've been trying to do this quite quickly like around my day job and in the weekends leading up to November so if I recap the steps again you're gonna know by heart by the end of this video your log line is the one line description of what this story is and it should be catchy and selly and make people want to read it or watch it your genre we all know what genres are self-explanatory who is it about is then the main character and the main character and the antagonist but all that was involved in that exercise was coming up with an adjective to describe each of them which you could then use to bolster your log line which I think is a good tool for marketing but it doesn't actually give you time to look at the cast of characters and I feel like not knowing a lot about the world of the cast of characters means that when you get onto the beat sheet it's really hard to fill those gaps because you you don't know who you're working with so one example for instance is in vampire board games I thought they could be a cool set-up scene where the main characters gathering everyone to go for dinner and it would almost be like in a movie where you get a montage and each character gets like a snippet where you get to see how weird and quirky they are and I really like that idea the problem is I don't know who any of these characters are so what I really wanted to do when I was writing like a note for that scene was rather than focusing on the beach heat I really just wanted to take some time aside and start mapping out the family tree and figure out who was who and what made them all weird and what the dynamics were because they've all been stuck in this house for so long so all in all really loved this process I will definitely do this again hopefully with a bit more time so I can actually do my proper 40s 40 scene storyboard having said that I do think there are a couple of steps missing and what I'd really like to do next time is take some more time to play with the idea and even just do some stream of consciousness writing where I write out not just a one paragraph description of the idea up the top of my head but all of the oh well what could happen in this world and what can happen in the story and who are the people I'm gonna be playing with and what are their quirks and how do they engage and when you start playing with that I think that gives you a lot of ideas so that when you get to this storyboard so again here you already have ideas to fill those gaps that's it for me on save the cat if I do have some more luck in the next day I will add another shot of my final storyboards to this video having said that November is next week and I still want to go through the story engineering process as well as well as combining the work that I've done for take off your pants and save the cat and story engineering so I don't know how realistic that is that anyway if you like this video please remember to like and subscribe and in the comments I'd love if you could share your own experiences of working with save the cat or if you have used any other plotting or planning or outlining methods for your books and what has worked for you and what are some of the things you notice that could be better until next time bye