Novelists often get carried away with characters. Or maybe that should be, characters often carry away novelists. Either way, well-developed secondary characters can run away with a story if you let them. In one of my sample book maps, I showed how this can happen. In my fictional fiction (sorry …
Tag: Book Mapping
Use Storybreaking to Fill Narrative Gaps
Once you’ve made your book map, you may find that it reveals a gap or disconnect in the writing — a place where you’ve jumped from point A to Point D without explaining to the reader how you got there. Storybreaking can help you close that gap. Narrative gaps can happen …
Using a Book Map to Edit a Novel
Last time we looked at how book maps can help in nonfiction editing. Now let’s look at how this technique can help novelists. As I worked on how to illustrate this, I found myself redacting so much information from so many client book maps, that you would get more out …
How to Use a Book Map
If you’ve read the last few posts, you may have decided to make a book map of your current project, whether it’s in progress or in editing. Great! But once you’ve built a book map, what do you do with it? You use it to examine the structure of your …
How to Make a Visual Book Map
Last time I wrote about how to use Excel to create a book map. My friend and editor Travis Perry once declared spreadsheets to be “antithetical to coherent communication,” and maybe you feel the same way, in which case a graphic representation may work better for you. Especially for people …
How to Make a Text-Based Book Map
There are lots of ways to build a book map, and once I describe my method, you may think of better ones. Whatever works for you will be the method to use. You can write your book map on paper as J.K. Rowling did, or you can get a little more …
Use Book Mapping to Examine Structure
A book map is a visual representation of a book’s contents. This allows for easy analysis of elements and can reveal gaps in the content of a nonfiction book or the storyline of a novel. You may have used a book map without even realizing that’s what you were doing. …