Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Revising a Scene: Step 2

Step 2 is to take the results of all the lists and exercises and freewrites of Step 1 and turn them into an outline for the scene. Note that there is no writing at all involved in this step; it's all cut and paste.

As always, open a blank document. Copy and paste your CUT TO's for the scene into the document. This gives you the bones of the scene. Now, add more and more meat to those bones. Paste in your chunks of edited dialogue where they belong in the scene, your steps toward and away from your goal, your setting details, backstory/worldbuilding/character development details, and your inner turning point moments. Just think through where these things belong in the scene, and drop them where they go. I would be shocked if this took you more than half an hour.

When you are done, you will have close to a thousand words of everything that needs to appear in the scene, in the order that you need to mention it. Good stuff.

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