You have 60,000 words. There’s a chapter that exists in three versions, a scene that starts at night and ends, for no reason at all, at noon, and a baker who was called Benny until page 140 and Bruno after that. You open the file, close it again, and think about dragging the whole thing to the trash and starting something clean.
Don’t. That mess is normal, and there’s a novel underneath it.
Why almost every draft comes out like this
Writing and organizing are two different jobs. While you write, you find things out: who your protagonist is, what the baker is hiding, why the egg was warm. Of course the beginning of the draft doesn’t know what the ending knows. The chaos is just the trail of everything you discovered on the way.
The real problem is something else. From 60,000 words away, you can’t see the shape anymore. And if you can’t see the shape, there’s no way to tell what’s extra, what’s missing and what’s in the wrong place. Rereading it cover to cover doesn’t help much either. By page twenty you’re fixing commas.
Pull out the skeleton: one line per scene
The fix is unglamorous, and it works. Make a list of every scene, in the order they appear. One line each. What happens, not how it’s written.
With the draft of Wanted: One Dragon, Sunday Plot’s sample novel, you’d get something like this:
- Mara locks up the library alone on the night of the summer dance.
- The glass case in the square is empty.
- The history of the egg since it arrived in town (scene? or my own notes?).
- Alex takes Mara’s statement between the bookshelves.
- Mara questions the hairdresser.
- Mara questions the hairdresser. Again, but in the rain.
And so on, to the end. Three rules:
- One line. If you need three, the scene is doing two things, and maybe it’s two scenes.
- No judging yet. The repeats and the odd ones go on the list too. You’ll decide later.
- If you don’t know what happens, write that down: “not sure what happens here.” That line is already a clue.
With the list in front of you, you’ll notice things the manuscript hides. The hairdresser shows up three times and Julia never does. Between scenes 9 and 20, Mara doesn’t move an inch. And that chapter on the history of the egg turns out to be a note for you, not something the reader needs in chapter three.
Tip: don’t reread, skim. The first paragraph of each scene, the last one, next. If you stop to edit, the list will never end.
The list, already in place
In Sunday Plot, that list lives in the outline: one chapter for each chapter of your draft and, inside, one scene per line, with what happens in “What happens”. Your prose stays on your computer; only the blueprint goes here.
Then: look over what you have
Once your scenes are in, switch on “I already have scenes: guide me through a review” in Settings. Guided mode will start with a phase of its own: “Look over what you have”.
The first step is the premise. Before you move anything: what is your novel about, in one sentence? It feels backwards, since you’ve already written the thing. But after a draft, the novel is often a different one. Maybe you started with a mystery about a stolen egg and ended up with the story of someone who can’t bring themselves to stay anywhere. Write today’s premise, not the one from day one. That sentence is what will tell you which scenes don’t belong.
The second step is putting each scene in its beat: in Structure, drag each card to the moment in the story where it falls. The ones that don’t fit anywhere wait in “Scenes without a beat”. That’s fine. A scene that doesn’t fit is telling you something too.
What you don’t need to do today
Decide what to cut. Rewrite anything. Pick which of the three hairdresser scenes is the keeper. All of that comes later, and it comes easier once you can see the whole novel on one screen.
For today
List the first ten scenes of your draft, one line each. Just ten. If you feel like keeping going when you’re done, go ahead. If not, you’ve got the start of the skeleton.
Once you have a few in the outline, switch on “I already have scenes: guide me through a review”. The first step is the premise: fifteen minutes and one sentence.