 So hello, my name is Jackie, welcome back to my channel, and it is the 28th of November, which means I have three days left until the end of the month when I need to decide what I'm working on for Nanorimo. So in this video I'm going to go through all of the notes I've taken over the last month, when I've been trying to plot, using Take Your Pants Off, Save the Cat, and Story Engineering, and once I have everything together and see what I have, then I'll decide what will be the book idea for Nanorimo. So here you can see everything that I'm working with. So on the left, this is from Take Your Pants Off. In the middle, with all of the post-it notes, this is Save the Cat, so the post-its are from my storyboards, while all of the pages are notes from the other steps in the process. And then on the right, we have the notes from Story Engineering. So that is everything I need to put together to create my Nanorimo master plan, and to decide which book I'm going to be working on. So I just quickly organised my notes, now I have a pile of papers for powerless, a pile of papers for vampire board games, and another pile for happily ever after. So now, now I'm actually not sure what to do next. So from here, I'm just going to go through what I have, write down any new ideas I come up with, and see where I am in half an hour. So I've just been going through all of my notes for powerless, and I'm realising that this is going to need a little bit more thought than I was originally anticipating. Which is a little bit annoying, because I sort of thought all of my thought was done by now, that's what this whole month has been, but what I'm realising as I go through each of the different outlines or beat sheets is that they each list different events, and they don't necessarily fit together into a single story. So I need to take a little bit of time to think about what I want to keep, and what I don't, and what will best serve the theme and the characters. So back to work. So I'm back, and where I left off last time, it was Tuesday the 29th of October, and I'd been putting together all of my notes for powerless. Somehow, it is now the 2nd of November, and I haven't done any more work since then, so I'm already running behind with NaNoWriMo, however I do want to finish this preparation process before I start writing. One decision I have made though, is that I am not going to put everything together for happily ever after, because I know, and I think you probably know by now, that that's not going to be the book I'm working on anyway. So today I want to go through all of my notes for Vampire Board Games, and then I can basically compare what I have for powerless with Vampire Board Games and start writing one of them. Hopefully later today so I don't fall too far behind on my NaNoWriMo word count goal. So let's see what happens. So I am done, or at least I am done as I'm going to be if I want to start NaNoWriMo at all. So I started October with, I think, 18 different ideas. When I started the first attempt at plotting and outlining, I used Take Your Pants Off, and I think I had six that I started with, and then I narrowed it down to three. And then today I had my last two, which were powerless and Vampire Board Games. And I'm excited to share that powerless is going to be the project I work on for NaNoWriMo. Having said that though, I am quite torn between them, and this might change in a few days. So stay tuned to see what happens. When it comes to the plotting methods themselves, I found all three of them to be useful, and I got different things from each of them. So Take Your Pants Off was the first one I looked at, and I am glad this was the first one simply because I found it very helpful for solidifying some of the ideas I had and getting them to a point where I could start to flesh them out, I could start to develop characters and plots. So in this book, I found the Storycore Exercise very useful for making those ideas more concrete. After that, I didn't find the plotting as useful. As I explained in that video, it felt like a list of events, there wasn't much cause and effect, so I really struggled to think of things that would just fill up the space. However, going through the early exercises was still really valuable for me, and that was what paved the way for the work I did in the next book. So the next one I looked at was Save the Cat, which you've heard me say this probably 18 times now, but I loved it. So my favourite bits of Save the Cat were the genre discussion. I really liked how Blake put stories into set categories and explained what the common features were of those categories, and that was really useful for again solidifying the ideas, especially vampire board games, because there were two potential genres it could have been, and each of those would have resulted in a very different approach to the plot and the characters and the settings and so on, so that little chapter was so helpful. I also really enjoyed the beach sheet. As I mentioned in that video, this one did have a far more cause and effect approach to plottings, so there are sequences of scenes where you can see how one runs on from the next, so you have your catalyst, which leads to a debate, which leads into breaking intact too, which is where the person stops debating about what happened in the catalyst and makes a decision to move forward with the rest of the story. Having said that, there were some things in the beach sheet that did feel like a bit of filler content or placeholder stuff, so off the top of my head they were fun and games and bad guys close in and the B story, and these are things that felt a little bit like we're including them because they're entertaining, we're including them because we need to take up more space to make this a full-length feature film, in the case of Blake's book, or a full-length novel, in the case of me and my experience, but they didn't have the same cause and effect nature as the scenes I really liked. After the beach sheet, the next step that Blake recommended was the storyboard exercise, and I really liked that, and in fact that was one of the main tools I was using today and earlier this week when I was trying to consolidate all of my ideas. I found having the boards set out with a post-it note for each of the scenes that I mapped out was a really good way to get a bird's-eye view of the story and to figure out where the gaps were. There are still gaps there, but at least I know, at least I know where they are, and when I wanted to start fleshing things out it was much easier to look at that as a guide than it was to flip back and forth through my notebook. And then the last approach I used was story engineering. So story engineering had, I think, two big strengths compared to the other books I looked at. The first one was character, so one of the things I mentioned in my other videos was that I felt a little bit rushed trying to get plots out and trying to map out beach sheets and storyboards when I hadn't even thought about who the story was about, so it was really nice to take a little bit more time doing that in Larry Brooks's book. The other thing that I really loved was Larry's approach to plotting, so unlike Save the Cat, where some things had a very cause-and-effect nature and some things felt a bit random, I felt like everything in Larry Brooks's story structure was there for a purpose. On top of that, his four-part structure gave each of the four parts a clear purpose or character which then helps inform the scenes that fit into each of those parts. So revisiting what I already had in my Save the Cat beach sheets and trying to retrofit that artillery structure was really illuminating and it started highlighting things that were placeholders or filler content or things that probably weren't going to work, so I really liked that approach. When it comes to where I am now, I was a little disappointed actually when I started putting everything together and I was hoping that when I did that I would have this epic master plan that I could use for an arrival and in reality what I found was that I had a lot of the same stuff just ridden over and over again so when I put together my ultimate beach sheet and my ultimate storyboard there were still the same gaps that there have been for the last few weeks and there wasn't a lot more in the scenes that I already had in my head. So that was a little bit frustrating. It means that I'm going into NaNoWriMo without a full outline so Paulus has I think about 17 to 20 scenes at the moment when a complete story should have about 40 according to Save the Cat and some of those even have question marks over them like it's like I know that I want a certain transition to happen but I'm not actually sure what the scene is that will bring that about so unfortunately I'm not as prepared as I'd like to be and I think one of the common themes for the past month has been I just wish I had more time to prepare but unfortunately NaNoWriMo is time-based, it is November and if I don't start now I'm probably not going to get it done so from here I'm going to dive in and see how I go with the planning I have. So if you're curious to see how that goes please remember to like and subscribe so you get notified of any new videos and if you're doing NaNoWriMo I'd love that if you put your story idea in the comments below because I'd love to hear more about what you're working on until next time bye