Scapple: Meet Boundless

I’ve been doing a chunk o’ worldbuilding and plotting for the revised Boundless. While my World Anvil is pretty sparse (spoilers, people), my internal notes are growing. Yesterday, I dug up this super-old relationship wireframe:

Dug up this super-old relationships concept (this is like 0.1 ALPHA, and there's 600 others, with far more detail) for Boundless. It's funny how some of these stick with me and others are dead and buried. #WritingCommunity #indieauthors #amwriting #amworldbuilding pic.twitter.com/Ifa3XhLGu7

— Richard Parry 👾 (@ParryForte) April 10, 2019

I figured you might get a kick out of seeing what the current story scaffold looks like. I’m a mix of outlining and discovery writing; I like to have an end state in mind, but freestyle the rest of it. The approach gives a structured tale while letting the characters tell their own part of it (and no, I don’t want to hear about how you find outlining or discovery writing better. You do you, hey?). After a few revisions, including wholesale deletion of dead weight (unnecessary characters, story beats, and other trash), we get something that looks more like a story scaffold. Behold:

Yeah I’ve blurred it out, because MEGAspoilers. But you get the idea; I start with the characters, then work in the story after (normally falling in with a 7-point system). My process for outlining is:

1. Whiteboard
2. Angst
3. Paper notebook
4. Angst
5. Whiteboard
6. Angst
7. Scapple

After this, I discovery write the rest.

I neglected Scappling my outlines the last couple of stories, and man, did I miss it. I love that tool; it makes it so easy to get a collection of incoherent thoughts and then structure ’em into sense and sensibility. If you haven’t tried it, Scapple is 100% worth the price of entry.