Greetings and salutations. It is I, Graham.   

I have always had one glaring problem in my storytelling, whether it be running a roleplaying game or writing a story. It is the same issue that I had with reading The Lord of the Rings. I tried reading that series on six different occasions before something finally clicked and I was able to get through the story. Perhaps a third of the way through The Two Towers we get to the section where Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are tracking after Merry and Pippin across the plains. That section always gave me trouble, leaving me with a feeling of, “they woke up, they ate breakfast, they traveled, they stopped for lunch, then traveled, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc”. Now, does the prose actually work out this way? Probably not. But it felt that way.   

This section is exactly the problem I have when doing storytelling, transition. Travel, downtime from one scene to the next. I have to get the characters from point A to point B, sometimes narratively, sometimes literally (literarily? Huh, huh? No? Okay, anyway). Transitions and time jumps are difficult for me. I feel like I am skipping over things that could be important. Add to this a feeling that I needed to write chronologically so I don’t lose the narrative thread, and you can see why I never made it past 50 or so pages on any previous writing projects.   

So when Clevenger introduced this whole idea of listing all of our scenes out and writing a short blurb in each to describe what is expected from the scene, it completely changed my mentality on writing. Now I could hunt for a scene I was in the mood to write. I could skip the transition sections because the scene listing would remind us of when they would be needed, and they could be added in editing.   

And speaking of editing! So much of our developmental and pacing editing got completely handled here in this stage, before we even wrote a single word. We could flip the order of scenes, insert slower but necessary scenes in between back to back action pieces, or vise versa, and punch up a string of dramatic pieces with a chase in the middle. Even better, since we were doing this in the scene listing prior, rather than in the editing phase, we knew what scenes could reference earlier material, rather than a scene being moved later due to pacing, then having to write out newly created continuity errors. 

Almost by accident, this system of listing scenes fixed my issue with transitions. It wasn’t just a matter of putting the transitions off until later. Instead, I began to see which transitions could be quickly glossed over, and which became their own important scenes, to be expanded for narration and pacing. It also enabled me to be able to actually finish writing a section and then move on. I was reminded, every time we looked at our scene draft, that I was adding to a rough draft, not a polished product. It enabled me to finish writing a section, add it to the rough draft and then forget about it. Rather than reread it, reference it, change it, tweak it, and obsess over wording choices. You know, all the things we aren’t supposed to do during the actual writing stage.  

So Clevenger, to answer your question about whether I appreciated us using a scene draft concept, I think we would not have a book without it. 

Don’t forget to love one another, 

 Graham