 Hello my name is Jackie and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here I'm an aspiring fiction author and in this video I want to talk about plotting and more specifically the one big mistake I seem to make when I attempt to plot. Now to give you some background I'm currently working on my second new project since university so I did one new project for NaNoWriMo last year and I started another one in Camp NaNoWriMo this year and before I started each of these projects I did a plotting experiment where I tried three different plotting methods for a couple of different ideas and then worked on the one that had the most information at the end of the process. So last year I did take off your pants, save the cat and story engineering and this year I did story grid, snowflake method and the story clock and both experiences got me to the stage where I had a list of scenes for my book. I had the overall structure mapped out and I had I think last year I had maybe 18-20 scenes for the book that I was working on and before I started my current work in progress I had around 33 scenes so not complete I expected with both of them I would need a couple of scenes but I felt like I had a pretty good starting point until I started writing and would get to a scene where I had a post-it note or a line in the spreadsheet which had a one sentence description of the scene and I'd realize that beyond that sentence I had no idea what was going to happen in this scene so if I use my current project as an example the codename is reciprocal stalking and it's about a woman who becomes obsessed with another woman and tries to orchestrate an all-consuming relationship and I knew there was going to be a scene where she was sitting on a fire escape across the road from her beloved apartment and she was going to be spying on her through the window and I had that written down as a scene like sitting on fire escape spying on Kara and it wasn't until I started writing that I went wait a minute so I know that she's sitting there spying but what's she actually seeing and I realized I had these huge holes in what I thought was a fairly good overview of my book I knew Cecily was watching Kara but I had no idea what Kara was doing when Cecily was watching her and this has happened several times so I'm at another point now where she is luring Kara's boyfriend into an abandoned apartment where she's going to lock him up for a while just to get him out of the way and that's fine I've got him lured there but then I don't actually know what she does with him while he's there like did they talk and if so about what and it's really frustrating to feel like I did all of this work and I still feel completely clearless about how this book is going to go and there's still so much work to do in fact I did a video I think earlier this year about how do you know when you're done and the more I do this the more I'm realizing that I'm not actually done in fact I don't think I'll ever be done until the book is in print another example of this was with my book last year where it was an action book it was Superheroes meets the Russian mafia and I knew that there would be an epic battle scene for the climax and on my post-it when I was planning I just wrote like epic battle and obviously I knew I'd need to figure out what would happen in the battle but I sort of thought oh I'll figure that out when I get to that part of the book and then I got to that part of the book and I had no idea what was going to happen in this battle and I needed to map it out using like pepper grinders and vitamin bottles and so on so I think I have a couple of questions here one is how much should you expect to have done before you start writing the book assuming you're not going to completely pants it and if you're going to have like every single scene mapped out do you run the risk of burning yourself out before you start writing the book or do you run the risk of draining all of the joy from the writing process because you've essentially already done the writing process and you're just stringing it together and fleshing it out and finally what do you do when you start fleshing things out and you realize that the more you add the less the plot you'd mapped out works and you end up in this indecisive limbo because you're like well I need to figure out this scene but if this scene goes in the way I think it's going to go then everything after this in the book completely falls apart and I basically need to start again which could potentially happen to me at the moment because I'm thinking maybe I just get rid of this character in this sequence entirely but then there's a bit later when someone catches her burying the body which is important and if she doesn't capture him and if he's not a thing then there's no body to bury so it's complicated and it's actually defeated the purpose of me plotting because my goal with plotting was to have a complete outline of the book so that when I sat down to write I would know what to write I'd have something to guide me and hopefully that would make the writing process easier and smoother and I wouldn't be going down these dead end paths only to have to step back and unravel everything I've done to get back on track again. It's all very frustrating. So what do you think? If you've had a similar experience in plotting please let me know in the comments. I'd also be curious for if you've found a way to address this that doesn't involve me starting my book again so please let me know and if you like this video please give me big thumbs up and I will see you next time. Bye!