While working with Family Thais, I came up with the idea of a story map.
I got the idea for story maps while reading books on writing screenplays. In screenplays, certain story events -- the major "beats" or story milestones -- tend to happen at very specific times. For example: within the first five pages of a screenplay, the writer needs to present an opening image that defines the world of the story ... and state (usually in a fragment of dialogue) the theme of the story.
Other milestones include the catalyst (around page 12), the Act Two break (around page 25), the midpoint (where stakes are raised, around page 55), and so on. (And yes, screenplay expectations are that specific. Don't believe me? Watch a mass-market movie, and you'll see the opening image within five minutes, the catalyst appear about twelve minutes in, the break into Act Two about twenty-five minutes in -- like clockwork.)
So I got to thinking: what if I took that very specific structure and converted it into something a novelist could use?
With this goal in mind, I took the screenplay formula and converted the page numbers into percentages: the opening image takes place in the first one percent of a 110-page screenplay, the thematic premise is stated at about five percent of the way in, the catalyst appears about eleven percent into the story, and so on.
With that done, the rest was easy, because now I could tell Excel the length of my novel (the number of pages or the number of words), and compute where the major story milestones would fall. For example: in a 70,000-word novel:
- The Opening Image gets presented within the first 1% (by page 2, or within about 600 words).
- The Premise gets stated within the first five percent (by page 11, or about 3100 words in).
- The Catalyst arrives about eleven percent in (by page 25, or about 7636 words in).
... right on to the Grand Finale (77% in, around page 180, or about 54,000 words in) and the final image (100% in, about page 233, or about 70,000 words in).
Cool, eh? When writing Family Thais, I found it very reassuring, as the novel grew, to have very specific milestones to reach ... and to know, very specifically, where those milestones should fall in my manuscript.
I call that outline my "story map."
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