Mapping out a plot
How does a visually-biased person map out the plot to a novel with 90,000 words?
The question answers itself, as it turns out.
I mentioned in a previous post that I’ve never been fortunate enough to visit Ireland. I am fortunate enough to live in the era of the internet and Google Earth.
I already mentioned my original idea for approaching this idea. I even showed the map. I used Google Maps and Earth to come up with ways to force this area of County Donegal into a 16 x 8 grid. The advantage of writing that you can shed the boundaries of a video game grid and work with a setting that is unconstrained and wide open.
The disadvantage of writing—especially for some neurodivergent people such as myself—is that the boundaries are gone, and the setting is now unconstrained and wide open.
Luckily for me, I already had the general idea of the plot, and had the major beats all the way up to the midpoint laid out in a “Save the Cat” format.
You can see the visual representation of the intended plot on the right.
There have been few internet-based problems I couldn’t solve with Google Sheets and/or Google Earth (Pro). And in the cases where they didn’t solve the problem, they still helped find the solution.
Away we go, then.
GE provided a sense of space and scope. I started drawing the paths of the characters and quickly learned that distances they had to travel were too short. Initially I had [redacted] going to [redacted] over the span of [redacted] day(s) before going on to the next destination, [redacted] . But the beauty of drawing lines on Google Earth is that it tells you the distance in your choice of units of measurement. And that trip was too short.
So now [redacted] had to go to the further destination, [redacted] , instead—almost bypassing the first place entirely.
Scions was always the story of a [redacted], which meant things had to happen [redacted] . And since it’s a historical fantasy with an existing and documented (such as it was) mythos, that means finding the locations of [redacted] , [redacted] , [redacted] and the occasional [redacted] . Then it was just a matter of plotting all the these [redacted] that might be of use to the plot and seeing how many of them lined up with each other and the overall locations central to the plot.
NOTE: Not all lines drawn were ultimately followed.
On top of that, certain scenes needed advanced blocking for the characters involved. Those I had to diagram on a notepad. (I’ll likely share those once those chapters are released.)
Post-mortem thoughts and advice
Organization
By the end, I had three folders in My Places, one for each act. I frequently saved my places (File > Save > Save My Places). When I got a chance, I color coded all lines and locations by act.
Working out of the cloud/on multiple devices
I wrote roughly two-thirds of the novel on my Chromebook, away from Google Earth Pro. That meant I had to finally sit down if I could export my places to Chrome OS’s version of Google Earth.
I had to export it as a KML file. I could export a folder’s worth of places and shapes—but only one folder at a time. If you do so, make sure GE is set to resume last view. Until I did that, I was always having to turn on those folders’ visibility each time I opened GE on my Chromebook.
It’s not just about looking top-down
Use Street View.
Take the time to go up and down those streets and roads.
Look at all the photos of a location.
Research the local flora—do you see it around your location?
Use the historical imagery and compare it to the most recent photos
No replacement for the real thing
If you get a chance, always visit. I really wish I could have before I wrote Scions. No doubt it would have been better.