Preparing My Time Travel Romance
I’m four chapters into my current work in progress. Though I’m sticking to romance, this novel is already so different. Since it involves time travel, I needed to spend more time prepping an outline and layout for the story I am telling. At first, I started with a regular formatted outline in Google Docs (which is the equivalent of Word for those who are unfamiliar with Google Suite). I needed something more structured and customizable, though. So of course I created yet another Google Sheet to help me structure my storyline.
If you are interested in checking out my outline template, click here to save a copy to your Google Drive. This is just a template, I don’t want to give away any spoilers from my current work in progress. Below I explain some of the tools and tabs included in my sheet and how to use them.
Key Plot Points
First thing I did was write out my story in timeline order, outlining it in short key plot points. I assigned each point a number so that I could always go back to the original chronological order of the story. Chronological meaning the order in which Guin (my main character) lives her life.
Then I started structuring my story by organizing the events into chapters and labeling them as present, flashback or flashforward. Since most of the story happens in the past but is Guin’s present, I wanted to include Guin’s past memories as flashbacks. In doing this, I’ll be able to develop her character while maintaining a steady pace – I hope!.
Being completely obsessed with spreadsheets, I of course went a step further adding a sparkline bar to show the progress of my writing as well as conditional formatting for the checkbox column. You can learn how to implement these features in your own sheets here. Ben Collins is a sheets genius!
Characters, Locations, and more
These next three tabs are very simple, just data really. But the layout has helped me organize my characters, showing which century they belong to, what they look like, a little bit about them and which chapters they appear in. I’ve created the same layout for locations as this plays a major part in my story. You can easily customize and/or duplicate these tabs to fit your own writing needs.
Page and Word Count
Another simple tab just to keep track of how many pages and words are in each chapter. My goal is to write at least 3,000 words for each chapter with a total of 110,000 words. I have a feeling this will be a long one so I’m sure I will reach my goal.
I would love to hear from other indie authors! How do you prep for writing? Do you prep at all?
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