Yay, I'm so glad you've found this helpful! 🤗 I was so grateful to my agent for describing that scaffolding analogy; it's such a useful way of thinking about it!
This is so helpful and instructive, thank you! I wrote my first novel for NaNoWriMo and got to 53,000 words by November 30. It's now at 65,000 and it's done - well, the first and second draft. I'm going to serialise it right here on Substack soon, but I still have plenty of editing to do. I only recently read Save the Cat! so I will play around with those beat sheets as well.
53k words over the course of NaNoWriMo is soooo impressive! And I love the idea of serialising your novel on Substack...I'm excited to check it out! Hopefully the Save the Cat beat sheets come in handy during your editing process.
This is THE post I needed!! So many amazing nuggets and I love the 'scaffolding' analogy!
Yay, I'm so glad you've found this helpful! 🤗 I was so grateful to my agent for describing that scaffolding analogy; it's such a useful way of thinking about it!
This is so helpful and instructive, thank you! I wrote my first novel for NaNoWriMo and got to 53,000 words by November 30. It's now at 65,000 and it's done - well, the first and second draft. I'm going to serialise it right here on Substack soon, but I still have plenty of editing to do. I only recently read Save the Cat! so I will play around with those beat sheets as well.
53k words over the course of NaNoWriMo is soooo impressive! And I love the idea of serialising your novel on Substack...I'm excited to check it out! Hopefully the Save the Cat beat sheets come in handy during your editing process.
YES! Especially the "cut x% from every chapter"—it does SO much while feeling so much less scary, haha
RIGHT?!? It makes tackling the massive overall goal so much less daunting!
Fantastic advice! I love Refuse to be Done.
Thanks lady! And I agree - it's filled with such excellent, practical advice.
Great post! I found a lot of this helpful even as someone who tends to write "short."
I'm so glad you found this post useful! :)