Storyboard Vision

Once the newly expanded R.J.’s Story was complete, I sent it back to story consultant Brad Schreiber. I knew I would need help, because so much of the manuscript was new material, and it had been proven that new material that came out of my head was far from ready for publication. As expected, Brad found new elements that needed attention, so he sent the manuscript back to me for further revisions. But, because I worked on my project during my "leisure" time, it took me 4 months to attend to those needs and again send the manuscript back to Brad for one last round of advice.

As usual, Brad was gracious with his criticism, but more firm about issues that needed resolution in order for the story to work. He thought it took too long for the residents of Heaven’s Wait to be introduced; certain character backstories needed to be livelier; all the necessary elements of a good story were there, but needed reorganization; and, for the sake of young readers, the length of the chapters needed to be more consistent. As most writers know, I had to fight the defensive urges that wanted to rise and sit on the comments for a couple of days.

 

I slowly accepted the fact that almost all of Brad's suggestions were accurate. What I decided to do was make myself a massive storyboard. First, I went through all the story chapters and gave each scene a name. Next, I made a column in an Excel spreadsheet for each chapter. Under the chapter titles, I listed the names of the scenes. This printed worksheet ended up being several pages in width, but once I spread it out on a table, I was able to see the entire story, scene by scene. What an eye-opener!

Then it was a matter of shuffling scenes, shortening some chapters and lengthening others… all the while making sure there was some enticement at the end of each chapter to make the reader keep turning the pages. I was working my way toward a story that was much more concise, and certainly more fluid. And during this process, I built myself a storyboard template to use for future story development.

My Heaven’s Wait folder was rapidly outgrowing its bounds.