I mentioned yesterday that I wouldn’t be following the Book in a Month plan exactly as it’s laid out in the book, so today I’m going to talk a bit about how I’m altering that plan to meet my needs for these 30 days, and more specifically how that will affect my use of “scene cards” – today’s focus.

The plan suggests creating 10 scene cards for the ten primary scenes in your book. As mentioned in my last post, that’s not quite possible for Three Weeks, due to the format – it involves an opening, and end, and 15 stories in between.

Realistically, I know that 15 sounds like a lot. I would be very much surprised if I didn’t end up with more like 10 – 12 when I actually draft the manuscript. The outline will focus on 15, and then I can whittle it down if needs be, incorporating the best elements of the cut portions into other outline areas if possible.

So rather than 10 scene cards, I have 17. They focus on story segments rather than “scenes” – the 15 stories, opening, and ending. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get them all done today or if I’ll need a second day. Either way, it will take as long as it takes, and I’m sure I’ll make up the extra time elsewhere.

What I’m doing is this: I took the basic scene card elements the book suggests, and turned them into note cards for each section (using 5×8 cards). It covers things like the characters involved in each story segment, settings there, etc., as well as sections for the segment’s intro, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, and section closings for me to jot down any specifics. Essentially, when I’m done with this portion, I’ll already have a basic plot outline for the entire book – cool, right? Then I’ll move onto things like character details, further setting details, props, etc.

A bigger deviation is the fact that the book is designed to be used in a few ways, including drafting an actual rough manuscript. However, I’m only using it to create a novel outline.

My biggest mistake in using the First Draft in 30 Days method was that I started out trying to follow the plan in an exact manner, which just frustrated me and didn’t adapt to my needs and how I work. So I’m being extremely lenient in my use of Book in a Month. There are already things in the plan that I don’t plan to spend any time on, because they won’t fit well with the book format or because I have other ways I like to do certain things. But I’ll be progressing through it as close to the plan as possible, and I’ll be using many of the worksheets and tools included to see how much they simplify the process.

So that’s the plan for today – get through at least half of these 17 “scene cards.”