Story Development Series: How I Use Notecards to Figure Out My Plot

I find notecards more useful than notebooks when putting together my story because novels come to me non-linearly. For me, when developing a story idea into a novel, I get ideas, snippets of dialogues, flashes of scenes, and the bullet point version of turning points in character arcs out of order. It isn’t until the font of ideas closes that the right order of my plot starts to appear. I lay all the notecards I’ve made out on a large table. Then, the fun begins: I move them around like a magic game of cups (the street game where a ball is hidden underneath one of three cups), tracking the plot as notecards move around each other. It is a combination of a magic came of cups and a jigsaw puzzle.

I walk away from the order I’ve settled on (but never without taking a photo of it first in case my cat moves them) for a day or two so I can come back to it with fresh eyes.

Then I tweak the order again, often adding more notes as I go.

The process continues until I feel solid about my structure.

This makes the drafting process much easier for me, especially while writing the middle section of my novel. I find it useful to know what I’m building towards on a smaller scale while actually writing. It helps me avoid becoming lost in the weeds. I have an individual notecard to refer to while working on a chapter while simultaneously being able to easily see the bird’s eye view of my novel.