I recently had an insightful meeting with my publishing team as I work through edits on Blood Capital. One phrase stuck with me, partly because it is so perfectly crude, but also because the resulting conversation has helped improve my process. The sentence was, “Don’t blow your load too early.” The context for this was a single chapter early in the book where I’d strayed from the path in two ways:
Oops.
Unpacking the above, I could see exactly what they were getting at, so I’m jumping confidently into the rewrite. However, it’s led to an expansion of my scene-writing process I thought I’d share.
Previously when commencing a scene, I’d rough out what I intended to do with it:
I’ve now added some additional dot points to these scene plans to help me better control the information I’m supplying to the reader:
We’ll see how the next version of the chapter turns out, but I feel the new rough-out is already much more helpful than what I’d been doing previously.
Do you do anything different?