Isabella Taylor
Frequent readers of “Her Campus Clemson” understand that I am highly against letting your inner perfectionist take over. What I mean by “inner perfectionist” is the little voice in your head that attempts to limit and strangle your inner “artist,” as Julia Cameron notes in her guide to creativity–The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. This voice is unrelenting, and none of what it says should be taken seriously.
On that note, I have created and compiled a list of certain things that will really boost your brain to start writing, especially if your goal is to write a novel. This will be a multi-part series on Her Campus Clemson, and I will follow alongside my own advice to work on a novel of my own. I am very excited to start this series, as I have had an idea for a novel for quite a while now.
I will be pulling from multiple sources and sprinkling in a bit of my own pizzazz to each part, so bear with me! The end result will be worth it–hopefully.
Your inner perfectionist is different for everybody, but the general message is about the same. They shame you for not understanding a complex sequence the first time, and they make fun of you for not producing Shakespeare in a class period. In my opinion, this voice is usually what deters aspiring writers, myself included. Not only does it make me feel inadequate, but it halts all progress I thought I had made. We need to get rid of that, or put that critic in a cage for now.
No. One Plot Map
Essentially the most basic story concept, the plot map, was originally coined by Gustav Freytag, a German Novelist. He called it the “Freytag Pyramid,” and it outlines a journey from the exposition to the resolution of any novel. You can learn more about Freytag’s Pyramid and its purposes from Sean Glatch, a writer for Writers.com.
My idea is to grab a large poster board or create an online board through some sort of service like Canva.com, and draw a basic Freytag Pyramid. This will allow you to really visualize your whole story arc, and might be useful in working out some kinks you hadn’t thought of yet. Make sure you include the exposition, rising action, conflict, falling action, and resolution of your novel, no matter how abstract it may seem now.
I would prefer to do this on a physical board because it allows for a greater creative reach and an easier modality if your service/website doesn’t offer a design you like. With this board, slowly add on bits and pieces of your characters, bullet point facts you will add later, plot twists, and essentially everything you want to eventually incorporate into your novel.
The plot map will be our stepping off point; on the map, everything else will have a place to land.
With the use of a plot map, your inner perfectionist will have to conform to the details you’ve already decided, and the perfectionist should be steered to keep all of the details straight, rather than hurt our first drafts. I think the plot map strategy will help keep that pesky inner perfectionist in check, along with some structured writing quotas I’ll outline later.