74. Capture Story Ideas with Discovery Drafts

Do you start writing fervently but get lost in the murky middle? Or have you ever had an idea for a story but you're not sure where to start? And sitting down to write a massive number of words feels intimidating?

In today’s episode, learn how discovery drafts can help you capture your story idea much more quickly—and provide flexibility for pantsers. 

Topics discussed in this episode: 

• Two case stories
• What is a discovery draft?
• What goes into a discovery draft?
• Many benefits
• Structuring your discovery draft
• Developmental edits vs manuscript evaluations
• Join writing sprints and get my prompts

Resources discussed: 

• Document navigation with styles: https://youtu.be/qjbMeZBrrOA 
• Different types of editors: https://erinptcanning.com/book-coaches-and-editors-whats-the-difference/

READY TO TAKE YOUR WRITING FURTHER? 

Join our Patreon community and access our vibrant Discord writing group to get writing prompts, participate in sprints, download free resources, and more: 
https://www.patreon.com/erinptcanningeditor

Transcript

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Do you start writing fervently but get lost in the murky middle? Or have you ever had an idea for a story but you're not sure where to start? And sitting down to write a massive number of words feels intimidating? If any of that sounds familiar, then stay tuned because we are going to learn about discovery drafts. This is Embracing the Fiction Author Journey, the podcast that helps writers pursue their author dreams. I'm your host, Erin P. T. Canning. I'm an author, editor, and book coach, and my mission is to help you own your identity as an author now, no matter if you're just starting out, or a seasoned author looking for updates and industry trends. Hey friend, welcome back to the show. Same podcast, different title. I have two different stories that I wanna share with you before we jump into discovery drafts. The first one is a friend of mine who was working on a new book and every time she got to chapter five, she would stop, couldn't figure out how to get past it. Wound up going back to the beginning and redrafting the first five chapters. She found herself stuck in this loop over and over again. So I had a little chat with her and I suggested, why don't you try a discovery draft, change the game for her. Another scenario. A client of mine had already finished writing her book, all 200,000 words, but she realized that she wanted to change things up. It didn't quite feel right, but with so many words on the page and being so deep in the story at this point, she couldn't figure out what needed to be moved or what needed to be added, or what the missing pieces might be. I suggested to this client a discovery draft, and that's been a game changer for her as well. So what is a discovery draft? Think of it as a middle ground between an outline and a first draft. It gives you a bird's eye view of your story so that you're not stuck so down in the weeds, so that you can look at everything at a glance. And so that you can see the entire structure of your story in a much more condensed way. And it enables you to better identify what works and what doesn't work. I'm gonna share how this applied to those two different scenarios afterward, but let's just go to like the nuts and bolts of what a discovery draft is. In short, you number your chapters, and then underneath each chapter, you are going to provide about three to five sentences that summarize the point of that chapter. It's basically how is this going to move the story forward? Is your character or your reader going to learn something new? Does your character have to make a choice between two equally appealing options? Does your character achieve a new skill that's going to help them win the battle at the end of the book? Uh. Are you introducing a key character? Ultimately, whatever it is that the chapter is about, you just wanna make sure that it is moving your story forward and that you have a cause and effect relationship going on there. That because of this thing that has happened, now your character has to face this or they're going to have to deal with this. After you have those three to five sentences that summarizes the purpose of your chapter, then you can break down the scenes that you'll have. You can do scene one and then description, and scene two and a deeper description. And what I like about these deeper descriptions is that they're just a couple of paragraphs, but they're easy and quick to write because they're like talking to your best friend, which means that it's mostly telling. I mean think about a conversation when you have with your friend. Well, he said this and then she said this, and this made him really feel this way. And so she thought, oh, okay, I'm gonna go and do this. Right? The whole point of this is to just get the ideas down on the page, and then it's also really easy for you to make notes, like, oh, don't forget to talk about this thing, or don't forget to foreshadow this thing, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a lot more manageable. The benefits of having a discovery draft, this kind of an outline, is that it's flexible and it works really well for both outliners and pantsers. If you are an outliner, it scratches that itch to have that really succinct outline of everything. If you're a pantser, it has that flexibility because you can drop in the scenes as you're thinking about them, and if you auto number your chapters, the way that I recommend, when you're dropping in those scenes, the chapter numbers will automatically update. It just gives you the ability to brainstorm freely without the risk of having to write, you know, 10,000 words that you might wind up throwing away later because you realize that your structure isn't working or your character arc is off, or whatever else you might discover along the way. And because of that bird's eye view, it means that you're working with less words than a first draft. So navigating the entire story, um, discovering how your scenes connect is just so much easier. This means that, again, you've got that bird's eye view of your structure. It's easier to make changes in your document. It's easier to throw those things in, and you're less likely to get lost in the murky middle because you're not so deep in the weeds that you can't find your way out. Another big benefit of using discovery drafts is that they allow you to track certain things. For example, when I'm working on my discovery draft, I will go through at the end and, or even in the middle. I'll look through my discovery draft, uh, tracking my character arc. So I'll notice, okay, this is where my character is at the beginning of my book. Here's where they are at the middle of my book, and this is how they've changed by the end of the book, and making sure that I'm hitting whatever it is that I need to do to show that progression of their character. Another time that I'm going through, I'll look specifically at the timeline. Actually, I do this when I'm building my discovery draft. Above my chapter titles, I'll put in day one, day two, day three, day four. Or if you're doing something over a shorter period of time, you know, hours if that's, if you're writing something that takes place over the course of 24 or 48 hours. But using that timeline, having that already built in there is super helpful where, if you're writing a fantasy book and you know you're on book four, and then you're referencing something that happened and it's like, oh, how, how long ago was that? And you can go back through your timeline and be like, oh, okay, well I'm on day 45, and the thing that she's referencing happened on day 15. Oh, so that was a month ago. Great. I can say, well, a month ago, dah, dah, dah, dah happened. So very easy to keep track of that. It also allows you, as you're writing your story to realize if you are giving your characters enough time to, like, let's say you have a romance, are you giving them enough time to get to know each other, really develop that deep relationship if it's not a quick and fast type of romance? I had a client who had submitted her manuscript, and after I did a developmental edit for her, I went through and tracked the time and I was like, wow, your characters have been so much, and it happened over the course of 48 hours, and I don't think that's what you were going for with this particular book. And she was like, oh, wow. I, I didn't realize that I just threw all this stuff at them within such a short period of time. And so we talked about ways that she could just put in a little more breath in there so this way her characters also had time to, uh, sleep and eat, and reflect on the things that they have been going through. Being able to track the timeline beforehand is very handy. Discovery drafts also help you to identify plot holes. And they're also really good with helping you to make sure that you're planting enough foreshadowing. You can go through your discovery draft one more time, solely focusing on foreshadowing. What are the big events that you want or those twists that you're gonna get, and then mark where are they in your discovery draft? And be like, oh, wow. I didn't realize that I went, you know, 15 chapters without ever mentioning or hinting at this thing again. Okay, let me sprinkle in two more in these potential scenes. And because a discovery draft is so flexible like this, it's really easy to insert those new ideas and those notes as you are playing with your idea. Kind of, you know, think of your discovery draft like your sandbox to just get me. You're not stressed about pretty sentences and, you know, fearing that you're going to wind up deleting all this work that you've put in. It's just, there's freedom in that. With all of this in mind, I had one friend, right, who kept getting stuck at chapter five. Well, when she went back, and she was able to look at the discovery draft, she wasn't stressing over what is this character's voice. She was just able to look at the bigger picture and capture all of those ideas. And once she was able to get past chapter five in that regard, because she wasn't in the weeds, the whole story just started to flow from there. For the other client, she took her manuscript on one side and she opened up a discovery draft on the other. And she just went through real quick, uh, summarizing all of those bits so that she could set aside and close that massive document and just look at the, this picture and be like, okay, do I have everything that I need? And when she was able to do that, she was like, oh, okay. Now I really see, like I, I wanted to track this aspect of her life and I realized that I forgot about it around here. So what's an extra scene that I can put in that would really show that? Or how can I show it in different scenes that already exist? So in both of those cases, it worked really well for them. Just some quick tips that I have when you were creating your discovery draft. I do recommend numbering those chapters and then adding some key words, like think of it as like a chapter title, but not really. It's just key words that help you to identify the purpose of that chapter, and then you apply style tags to those chapter names. Style tags are built into Word and Google Docs. But basically when you apply these styles to the headings, it creates on the side of your Word doc or your Google Doc, a navigation pane that you can open up and you can physically see all of the chapters, and you just click on them. And it takes you directly to them in your book. So you don't have to just scroll through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of words. You just click and you go there. And that's why it's also really easy for you to navigate adding those additional scenes or way points that you wanna use. I go into depth on, uh, style tags and how they work in episode 25. I actually shared my screen with you so you could see how to add them. Highly recommend that you look at that episode. The auto numbering of the chapters, I add those and then I right click on heading one for my chapters or whatever heading I've applied to it, and I right click on the heading, and then I say update to match style, and that auto adds the numbers to all of my chapters. The advantage of that is if I, you know, know that I want scene A, and I know that I want scene D, but I don't know how my characters are going to get from A to D, when I do finally figure that out and I start dropping those scenes in or chapters in, the numbers will automatically update for me. So this way I don't have in my draft later on, you know, two chapter sixes, and then I go from chapter 12 to chapter 14 accidentally. So, yay for auto numbering. I will also apply style tags to the scenes. Remember where I said that you do the number and the keywords that identify the chapter, the three to five sentences that summarize its purpose, and then you can do scene one, couple paragraphs. Scene two, a couple of paragraphs. Well, that scene one and that scene two, I'll apply the style headings to that as well, along with maybe a couple keywords to help summarize what that scene is going to cover as well. And all of that, again, will show up in my navigation pane. To cover everything, hopefully I'm not gonna overwhelm you with this, I actually have four levels, so if I'm going to include acts in my discovery draft, if I'm breaking it up that way, then I'll apply my heading one to the act. Then I will apply heading level two to the day or hour, depending on what type of timeline I'm working with here. Then I'll apply heading three to my chapters and then heading four for my scenes. Check out episode 25 so you can see how to apply these styles and make navigating your Word or Google Doc so much easier and faster. If you're still confused about structure, character development, backstory, how to fit in flashbacks naturally, et cetera, you can always seek a developmental editor. And you can also ask them if they offer a manuscript evaluation. They're kind of the same thing, but a developmental edit would be, say you go to the movies and you get to watch the entire feature film, whereas a manuscript evaluation would be like watching the trailer. Sometimes you just need the trailer. And in the case of getting developmental feedback, a manuscript evaluation is a less expensive way to get feedback. It's not as detailed, but it will help point out those plot holes and character development issues. And hopefully the editor that you're working with will also offer some solutions to help you figure out how to get over those hurdles. And if you're interested in working with me, I'm always happy to help out another writer. I will have included at the bottom of the show notes, both an article that helps further explain the services that editors offer, the different types, including a manuscript evaluation, and I will also include a link where you can reach out to me if you would like more information. I hope you found this helpful. If so, consider joining my Patreon page. For only $5 a month, you can help keep this podcast going. But even more so than that, you can join us for our monthly writing sprints and you'll also get access to the writing prompts that I put out every month. And I work really hard to put together a variety of writing prompts, from scene starts, to image inspirations, to six words that you could use for like a poem or a story or a scene that you have to work on. I've had clients come to me and tell me that one of those prompts actually launched an entire new chapter for them. So come and join us on Patreon. We would love to have you in our Discord group. It's so much fun. I'll provide the links in the show notes. Thank you for watching, and as always, keep writing my friend.