Story Gardening Method

Nikki’s Story Gardening Method

FIRST THING
tell your inner critic he can go take a nap. It’s time for the inner child to play right now. The critic can come back after you have a draft. Critics are rude and always ruin playtime. But they’re pretty good at fixing and polishing once you have the goods.


SOW THE SEEDS OF YOUR SCENE

Scene Overview/ Description - You know which characters are in the scene, and what your general idea is for the scene. Put it in a sentence or a paragraph. This is a placeholder and can suck and have stinky grammar. Just get the idea down. This is you being 10 and telling your mom your cool idea. You don’t have to know why or how it will work or know all the parts yet. Just say what you do know, on the page.

Set Pieces - This is the “wow” and the style you know you want most. There have to be robot dinosaurs. And stained glass with biker motifs. You need a pirate song. A ninja fight on the roof. Whatever is itching to be in the setting, an important description, key event, or discovery. Put it all down.

Crystal Clear Must Haves - You hear your character saying these lines. You see your character taking these actions. The story is made for these moments that are already *begging* for you to write them. They play on repeat in your mind’s eye. You just don’t know how to get from here to there yet. Capture them.

Compose a Beat List - Look at all that stuff you put down already! Now push them around until they’re roughly in a sensible order of events. Fill in the gaps with quick place holder jots of what should happen or be said. Each time someone speaks or someone acts or there is an important pause etc that moment is called a BEAT.


WRITE
Write overtop of that beat list! Work over your beat list with all the necessary bells and whistles and descriptions and fun wording. Add, subtract, reorder, and edit as necessary while you’re writing and things become clearer.

Get ice cream and rock out around the room for a minute. You drafted a scene!


Scene List - To draft a story thread made up of scenes, do a scene list of short descriptions and let your inner child play in each just like the above directions. Reshuffle and add and subtract to your scene list as you go.


When you’re ready, invite your critic back. He’s got opinions and you can maybe let him help you fix the grammar now.