Happy Easter to all. I took a day from the long weekend to just kick back and dawdle through some plot and character stuff for my novel. Nothing hard or intense. Just art for art’s sake. It was pretty restorative.

I like to think this proves I’m not all about the crazy systematic organisation I hint at here from time to time. Often, like today, I just open my novel’s Scrivener project, create a folder to play in, and try something new I’ve read about or seen or YouTube, and consider it a win if throws up one or two things I can transfer to my plot, setting, or character folders.

What I went with today wasn’t even as directed as that. I borrowed from a video from Ellen Brock’s YouTube channel and just wrote up a synopsis of the novel based on what I already know, to get it all in one place where I could see what was missing.

The activity took a while, as I didn’t hurry. In the end, it showed me I was short on characters and arcs–I had a surprising number of potential scenes, but very little connective tissue.

So, I picked a goal and suitable arc for one of the secondary characters that bound together and motivated a number of scenes. I also created a new secondary character, a friend for the protagonist but one whose arc unintentionally torpedoes the protagonist’s main goal and propels him into the climax.

Once I plugged the new material into the bare synopsis, it spruced things up quite a bit, and was deeply satisfying.