The HDCCS

Last month over on my Amazon blog, I wrote about my Writer's Toolkit. Just recently, necessity being the mother of invention, I've added another tool.

I'm at that point in Birdie's book where the different plot lines (past and present) must begin to come together. I love doing this layered sort of story -- but it can quickly go out of balance if one character wants to talk too much. And as the pages grow in number, scrolling up and down the computer screen to see who said what when becomes tedious. and I forget what I was looking for anyway.

Hence, the Handy Dandy Colorized Chapter Sequencer. (It's all my own invention, as the White Knight told Alice.)

This is my map of the first 200 + pages of Day of Small Things. It allows me to see at a glance that different elements are reasonably balanced. Or at least, not horribly unbalanced.

Each post-it represents a chapter (except for the purple ones but I'll get to that.)

Like this:

Mustard - historical secondary plot (you know, the part in italics, for example the Little Sylvie story)

Pale yellow - present day, Miss Birdie's point of view (hereafter called POV)

Pink - present day, Calven's POV

Green - present day, Louisa's POV (Miss Birdie's niece from Detroit)

Purple - I'm calling these 'Artifacts' and they are single pages that I think of as written illustrations. Could be a newspaper clipping, a page from a diary, an advertisement. Odds and ends that illuminate and add depth to the story.

I'm always trying to match the historical plot to the present day and sometimes as I write, things change. Thus, I've had to reshuffle my sequences several times. The HDCCS (suited to the meanest intelligence) allows me to see it all at a glance and provides me with the comforting illusion that I'm in control of this unwieldy cast of characters.

As if.