Last night I finished the map for my revision. Or I think I did. It took awhile.

Like I said in my last post, I identified some areas that I think I can improve in my book. Most of the problems stem from, even though I intentionally put in scenes that serve more than one purpose, much of my draft being single layered, as in only one thing happening at once. Part of that is because Dakotashi can be pretty single-minded. Part of it is also I don’t always see how things connect or how they can connect until the first draft is finished and lay it all out. Then it’s like fitting together and rearranging a puzzle.

This time I used Scapple, a kind of note board from the creators of Scrivener. You start with a blank “page” and then add notes that you can move around and connect with each other with dotted lines or arrows. You can change text and border color and even border shape. So for my revision map, I wrote a short descriptive name for each scene (which I’ve already done in Scrivener b/c I don’t divide into chapters until later in my process) and then I started adding stuff, moving things around and seeing what connected/seemed to work better. All while keeping in mind the goals I had identified for my revision.

Here is screenshot of the first couple of scenes. The rounded black borders are the original scenes. Green is new material in a current scene. Blue is combined and Blue with a jagged border is moved and combined. It turned out to be pretty linear (with offshoots). If you look at what I did while brainstorming before I wrote the book, you can see that one was really free form.

Then, I wrote a synopsis based on the outline to see if I could get everything to fit and flow. I did have to refer to my draft some to remind me exactly what was going on is some scenes. I have thought of a couple of problems that will necessitate some further refinement, but I think what I have is workable.

Next Steps: Expanding on the details when I put everything back into Scrivener for a more detailed outline moving forward. I’ll probably do some nitty gritty character and relationship progression work as well. I will be trying to follow the Revision: Plan for Attack that I thought of a couple years ago, refining/changing as I see fit.