 Hello and welcome back to my channel. My name's Jackie and if you're new here I'm an aspiring fiction writer and in this video I want to announce my project for Camp Nanarimo in July 2020 as well as talk about my plan of attack. So first, the project. I am going to be picking up my Nanarimo 2019 project powerless and revising it. So this is the first draft. It is approximately 70,000 words, maybe 68 and I reread it for the first time. About six weeks ago now I'm going to say at the beginning of May. So I have taken a look at it. I think it does have promise. I don't think, I don't know, maybe it does need a complete rewrite. I was going to say I don't think it needs a complete rewrite. Like I don't think I will be throwing this out and just writing down the key plot points and writing it again from scratch. I think it will be more a case of editing it. However, when I get into it who knows what'll happen and the reason I say that is because I haven't really revised a project before. So if you haven't seen many of my videos you might not know that I was very very into writing when I was a teenager and at university and then I finished uni and I got my first job and I was very lucky to get a job in writing so I work in content marketing at the moment. And what I found was when I started working in writing I stopped writing fiction. So from when I finished my studies at the end of 2007 until mid 2019 I didn't really do any writing at all. Not fiction writing at least. I write nonfiction every day as part of my work. Actually in the interest of full transparency I did try to get back into writing in 2017 I believe it was. I started using a service called 750 words where you write 750 words every day and I did get up to a 100 day streak doing that but then I stopped again so I had this three or so months in 2017 when I tried to get back into fiction. So I hadn't done anything regularly until mid last year. So because of that I haven't really had any projects that have been revisable and if we go all the way back to high school in uni my approach to revising then wasn't... I don't think it was really revising like I would print out my book, I would read through it, I would correct any typos I found and then I would make really deep observations like oh it's been a while since we've had an action scene why don't I put a fight in here which had nothing to do with the plot but like we need action or I remember the first full length manuscript I ever wrote I decided there were these two characters and I wanted to reveal at the end like they were romantically involved and I'm like okay so every time I have a list of character names like when there is a group of them I'm always going to list those two next to each other like even if they weren't standing together in the room I'd just make sure their names always appeared next to each other as like this covert signal that these two were a couple. So this is the level of my revisions in the past. Now I do want this book powerless to be the best it can possibly be I do want to submit it to an editor later this year to get some feedback so I'm expecting to do much more heavy lifting this time round. With all of that said here is my plan of attack. Step one is to look at the foundations of the book so by that I mean things like theme character and especially the antagonist protagonist dynamic because as I've mentioned in a couple of past videos this is something I've really struggled with and I actually think this book is one where we could have a really strong dynamic mainly because the antagonist and protagonist do know each other they do have history the plot does put them directly into conflict so I think that could be a lot stronger so I want to play with that. When it comes to character I actually did character work in my prep for this book so before I wrote the draft but I think what sometimes happens is you start writing and you start to learn more about the world and the characters evolve on their own so I really want to go back and do some more of that character work so the resource I'm going to use for the antagonist protagonist stuff is On Writing and Well Building by Tim Hickson who also has the YouTube channel Hello Future Me. For the character stuff I'm going to use Story Engineering by Larry Brooks which has a chapter on characters which I found really useful when I was doing it before I wrote this book. Once I've looked at the character work and the foundational pieces I then want to give the plot an overhaul so I'm going to use Story Engineering again in combination with the Story Clock Workbook. Now the Story Clock Workbook if you haven't seen that video basically gets you to put plots onto a clock like this so you can basically see how the events are distributed throughout the book on a single page and you can also use this diagram to map out symmetries so if you have like an event up here you might want to have a reflective symmetrical and no a related event that appears like down there so you can sketch all of these dotted lines between symmetrical events. I'm not explaining this very well at all so I will include a link to the plot devices website they are the ones who created the Story Clock Workbook in the description below along with a couple of the blog posts I found really helpful where they analyze the plots of different films and TV shows where they demonstrated one how the plots were structured but two also how symmetry played a role in these plots. So the way I'm planning to do it is because the Story Clock Workbook has these pages that I just showed you with two clocks I'm going to use one clock to outline everything that I currently have so the way powerless looks without me having changed anything then I want to use the next clock to create the ideal plot and I'm going to use Story Engineering to help with that. Now Story Engineering which I've also done a video on and will also link to there are some things about the book I find frustrating it is a bit longer than it needs to be but I love Larry Brooks's approach to structure. He breaks down books into four parts and he also breaks those parts and the books as a whole into percentages so at this percent of the book something should happen at this percent something should happen and in that outline there are certain events he argues every book needs to hit in order to be effective so there is the first plot point which happens between 20 and 25 percent of the way through the book and this is when the plot really gets started at 37.5 percent there is the first pinch point which is when the antagonist sort of makes they might make a strike towards the protagonist but in any case they appear in some way in the book and raise the stakes there is the midpoint at 50 percent which is when the protagonist stops being reactive because from 25 percent until now they've just been reacting to the story they've been thrown into and they start becoming proactive they move into their attacking phase at 62.5 percent that's when there's a second pinch point so the antagonist comes up again and then at 75 percent we have the second plot point or the climax and this is when in this case because this is a book involving superheroes and the russian mafia this is when there is the epic battle final showdown so I do know that I already have most of these elements in there I'm just not sure if they ended up being in exactly the right position when I came to drafting the book so when I map out this new plot it's going to be basically reorganizing the events to make sure everything does sit in the right place as well as figuring out where I need more in order to ensure that this first plot point does happen at 25 percent rather than happening at say 15 percent which is too early so that's the plot once I've looked at the plot the next thing I want to look at is scene structure and I have a feeling this is going to be a combination of me looking at the way scenes are structured when I'm actually in the rewriting revising process but I think I'll also look at a couple of key scenes that I know aren't working or maybe the key scenes that happen at those key percentage points and I might look at them in advance one as a test exercise for the method I want to try and two just to make sure those are sorted before I get stuck in the book and potentially forget all of the work that I've done up front so to do that I'm going to be using the story grid workbook now if you've seen my story grid video you'll know that I am not a fan of this book I think a how-to book is supposed to be a standalone resource that teaches you how to do things in a structured and organized manner and this book does not achieve that goal at all however if we look at the wider story grid universe which includes the story grid blog and the story grid podcast there is a lot of useful information in there you just need to be able to find it in fact there are two things I will be looking at in the story grid universe one is in the blog there are a number of secrets of the x genre blog posts so I'm going to be looking at the secrets of the action genre blog post because that lists the obligatory scenes for the action genre as well as set conventions that that genre needs to meet so I want to list all of those actually back when I'm doing this and make sure all of those things are covered in my outline once the outline is done I also want to use the story grid for figuring out scene structure because one of the things the story grid team talk about is the different steps that happen in every single scene so every single scene has an inciting incident every single scene has a crisis every single scene has a climax I am forgetting events so just give me a moment to find it sticky tabs make it much harder to turn pages quickly so there are five things that I want to address in each of my scenes now in the book Sean Coyne talks about the beginning middle and end of your book and says each of those sections of your books should address those five points however a fellow author tuber Nicole Wilber did an amazing video where she actually showed how she reworked a scene from one of her projects using these five points so I'd actually like to try applying these five points to each scene in the book rather than applying each of these five points to a section of the book which I think is just going to make things confusing when I'm already using the story engineering framework to look at the book from a macro perspective so these points are one an inciting incident so what is the inciting incident that sets the scene in motion two progressive complication so something started how does it get more complicated and you can have more than one progressive complication two what is the crisis that happens so in the crisis is more a crisis question which is what will the character do now that they've been faced with this complication the next thing is the climax so what is the climax of the scene and then how does it get resolved so I don't know how I'm going to go trying to apply that to every scene in the book but I think it will be a helpful exercise especially for those key scenes I mentioned and then I've got to rewrite the thing so the way this is going to work is I finish my current job on the 19th of June and I start a new job on the 1st of July so in that week and a half between jobs I want to do the background work so that's when I want to do the foundational work around characters and their protagonist antagonist dynamic that's when I want to give the plot a good look so story clock story engineering and those obligatory scenes and conventions and I think I'll also try to look at the five key points for the opening couple of scenes because I feel like the very beginning of the book is one of the weakest parts of the draft so ideally I'll have all of that done by the time July starts and then once July starts I can just focus on editing revising rewriting this book whatever it turns out to need now that I've covered all of that the next question is what is my goal for this camp well originally I really wanted to get the whole book done so I was originally going to set a goal of revising 70 000 words however because I am starting a new job I do want to be realistic about my time and energy so I've set the goal for 50 000 words which I think is a bit more doable if I get more done great if I miss that I will be very disappointed because I missed my goal for the last camp nanorhyme I was well but like I said last time life happens and if this new job does end up being really time consuming if I'm not able to put the energy towards getting as much done as I'd hoped it is what it is in any case the next project I'm working on is revising powerless it is going to happen in July and probably August as well and then I'm hoping it's in a state where it'll be ready for editing and later this year hopefully I I don't know if I'll get it ready for submission just because we're running out of time this year but at least it will have been to an editor I will have more feedback I can turn it into the best possible book and if I don't get it out to submission this year then I would love to get it out to submission next year so that's what I'm going to be doing in July's camp nanorhymo what are you going to be working on please let me know in the comments below if you are not connected with me on the nanorhymo website I've put my details in the description you can also search for me I'm just JP rights there as well and other than that if you like this video please give me a big thumbs up to keep the gods of youtube happy and I will see you next time bye