Storyboardishness

Today I had a burst of inspiration for this novel idea (let me clarify - an idea for a novel) that I've had simmering in the back of my mind. It was an idea for a new scene. It opened up a lot of ideas for the rest of the novel.

So, since I've been reading Story Engineering (which is all about planning out your novel) I thought, why not plan out this one? I'm already writing two stories at present, but what if I had this one all ready to go when I finished them?

So I tried something I haven't tried before: storyboarding.

Okay, well, to be clear, it's not technically storyboarding the way I'm doing it. It's storyboarding for writers, which has no pictures. (I found a tutorial on one way to make a storyboard!)

You see that red wallet-looking-thing at the top of this post? That, when opened up, is a photo holder. It can hold 24 photos. But instead of photos, I put scene cards in them, like so:

Just to be clear, this is not the working title. It's just a placeholder until I find a working title.

I started with a title card, and then wrote a query/synopis card to remind myself of the basic premise (and to be thorough). After that I wrote out a scene card for the prologue and the scene after that.

I used a grunge filter to make the iPhone-quality picture look less lame.

And here's another grunge-filtered picture of the whole thing. After I fill out ten scene cards I'm planning on putting them all into one photo pocket since there are only 22 (discounting the title and synopsis card). That leaves room for about 220 scenes.

I'm pretty excited about it - I've never planned out a story this way before. We'll see how it goes...

In other news:

I saw The Avengers over the weekend! It was a fantastic movie. Austin, over at Gift of the Present, did a thorough review of The Avengers that I thought was very insightful. Daniel also wrote a very thorough spoiler-free review, as did Raquel and PolkaDot.

I recently found (and followed) a blog called Scribblings of My Pen and Tappings of My Keyboard, by Anne-girl. She did an excellent post on "being real" that I highly recommend you read. I think she hit it spot-on.

Becky Doughty from Braveheart featured my post "Top Ten Tips for Creating Top Ten Tips Lists" as her Friday Guest post! If you haven't read it or want to read it again, go check it out (and look around Becky's blog a little bit.)

If you haven't already, go leave a comment telling me how you cope with deadlines so I can feature it in Friday's post.

Have you ever done story cards? Ever extensively planned out a story? Do you have any tips for keeping your story cards or scenes straight? 

Do any of the links sound intriguing?

Let me know by commenting!