The blank page has a terrible reputation. It gets blamed for lost afternoons, weeks of being stuck and the occasional deep clean of the silverware drawer that nobody asked for. But look closely and it’s almost never the page that scares you. It’s sitting down in front of it without knowing what’s supposed to happen.
Once that’s settled, the page is still blank, sure. It’s just a page now, not a cliff edge.
Two jobs getting in each other’s way
When you sit down to write a scene you haven’t thought through, you’re doing two things at once: deciding what happens and finding the words to tell it. Each one is work. Together, they trip over each other.
You write a sentence. You wonder whether Mara should go to the hair salon first or to the twins’ bar. You delete it. You look out the window. You go back to the sentence, which now seems worse. An hour later you have two lines and a strong suspicion you’re not cut out for this.
You are. You were just doing two jobs with one head. The fix is to split them up: decide first, at some other time (another day, ideally), and sit down to write with only one job in front of you.
Start with the scene sheet
Before you write a scene, four short answers. One line of “what happens”, plus the usual three questions: goal, conflict, outcome.
In Wanted: One Dragon, Sunday Plot’s sample novel, there’s a scene where Mara questions Nuria, the hairdresser, on the pretext of renewing her library card. Its sheet might look like this:
- What happens: Mara walks into the salon with the library card as an excuse, and Nuria gives her a trim she never asked for.
- Goal: get Nuria to tell her what she knows.
- Conflict: Nuria will talk about anything except what matters. And the scissors keep moving.
- Outcome: yes, but. The glass case had been fogged up for weeks, and Olivia had been getting visits from a man from Madrid. Two clues and two inches less hair.
With that in front of you, you’re not sitting down to invent anymore. You’re sitting down to tell something you already know.
The “what happens” line is a guide rail
That line is what you look at when you get lost. And you will get lost: halfway through, you’ll catch yourself writing a lovely paragraph about the old hood dryers. No problem. Go back to the line and ask: does this get Mara closer to the clues? If not, keep moving. The dryer paragraph can stay or go when you revise.
A guide rail isn’t a cage. If Nuria says something you didn’t see coming and the scene gets better, follow her. Afterwards, change the line so it says what actually happened. The sheet is there to help you write, not to be obeyed.
Start in the middle
Nobody says you have to start with the first sentence. First sentences are the hardest, because they feel like they have to be good, and that freezes everyone.
Start with the moment you’re most excited about. Nuria, scissors in midair, asking, “So where were you on Saturday? I didn’t see you at the dance.” Write from there. Once the scene is rolling, the beginning usually shows up on its own. Or you find out you didn’t need it: lots of scenes work better if they walk in when things are already happening and leave as soon as they stop.
Write badly, on purpose
A first draft isn’t a test. It’s the version that exists so a better one can exist later. Nobody’s going to read it but you, and you already know what you meant.
One trick that works: whatever you don’t know goes in brackets, and you keep going. [name of the hair dye], [something clever Alex says here], [check whether Julia knows about the oven yet]. Filling gaps is a job for another day. Today the scene just needs to exist.
Tips
- Read the sheet right before you write, not the night before. Two minutes is enough to get the scene back in your head.
- Stop in the middle of a sentence. Tomorrow you’ll know exactly where to pick up, and you won’t be starting cold.
- If ten minutes go by and nothing’s coming, look at the scene, not the page. Something on the sheet is usually missing, and most often it’s the conflict.
- One scene at a time. Thinking about the whole novel while you write one scene is like checking a map of the country to cross the street.
For today
Pick the next scene you’re going to write and fill in its sheet: what happens in three lines, and one line each for goal, conflict and outcome. If you’ve still got some energy, write just the sentence from the middle, the one you most want to write.
In Sunday Plot, every scene has a printable sheet with all of that, plus who’s in it (with their age on that day), where it happens, when, and what happened just before. The Writing screen lists your scenes in reading order, each with its sheet, and an “I’ve written it” button to tick them off. The prose itself you write wherever you always do. Sunday Plot keeps track of the novel from the outside; the words are yours.