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Once, a while back, I tried to use notecards when noveling to organize and develop my novel. The idea (a fairly common one, I believe) was that each scene is noted on a notecard, and you can then visually order them and add/remove scenes; it creates a high-level overview that helps with pacing and flow, and finding superfluous scenes to cut or holes that need an added scene.

I liked the idea, but I couldn't make it work in practice. About halfway through the novel I had a stack of less-than-useful cards, that didn't seem to add any value to the noveling process. So, I abandoned it.

Lately I started using Scrivener - which has a notecard feature - so I want to give it another shot. I think my problem may have been what I put on the cards. Some had lots of detail, others quite sketchy, and generally what I put on each would seem important at the time but later had me wondering what I meant.

So, What should be put on scene notecards to make them useful? Especially, what are the set of things that should be on all notecards to make them useful as a whole as well as individually?

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up vote 3 down vote accepted

For each scene, I like to note:

  • The POV character
  • Goal: What the POV character wants in this scene.
  • Obstacle: Who or what gets in the way of the POV character's goal.
  • Result: Whether or not the POV character achieves the goal.

If the character has a significant dilemma (more than a paragraph) in response to something that happens in the scene, I'll note:

  • Reaction: The character's reaction (emotional, thoughtful, or both) to what happened.
  • Dilemma: The options that the character weighs, and the problems that lead the character to discard most of them.
  • Decision: Which option the character chooses and commits to.

Those are the basics. I often note a few details or complications about some of those things.

And I might note my goals in the scene (demonstrate something about the character, set up or foreshadow some later event, reveal new information, hide some detail in plain sight, and so on).

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It all depends on what you want on those cards. Since I tend to worry about the details of a scenario when I'm writing it specifically, I tend to be pretty rough when I plan like this, but I recommend four basic elements be on all of your notecards:

  1. What characters are there.
  2. Why they're there.
  3. What happens to them.
  4. How this affects the characters and the story.

With these guidelines, you shouldn't have any problems knowing where a scene is going when you actually sit down to write it.

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I use an extensive array of index cards. The core thing I learned about index cards is make sure you know what information you want to put on them before use and ask yourself before pulling out a fresh index card will a new card help to better organize my work, or will it obfuscate my process and clutter up my desk?

Don't take clutter lightly. To much of a good thing can be bad. The important thing is to use a tool, in this case index cards, only when your sure you need it.

I generally plot out five or six key scenes, and then as I write, I get ideas for scenes, and create a few index cards to fill some of unknown region between key scenes, revising these cards as I write and improving my grasp of the narrative.

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