StoryCraft Novel Challenge Day 26: Visualize your story with a Story Clock!

It’s the final week of the StoryCraft Novel Challenge! This week, we’ll be working on our outline and writing plan for when we start drafting, and a great exercise to visualize your story in between drafts is a Story Clock.

To create a Story Clock, you’ll want to draw a circle and mark out the four corners: Beginning/End, Inciting Incident, Midpoint, and Climax.

We have an amazing exercise for this in the StoryCraft Workbook.

Using the clock as a visual tool, plan out when all your major story beats happen via percentage. These might need to be estimates for the first version, so just make your best guess.

Once all the major beats are in, use two different colors to mark out the beats that need to be set up and the beats that need to be paid off. Draw lines across the clock and check if your setup or payoff is symmetrical. They don’t have to be, but it can be helpful if you don’t have a setup or payoff to place them directly across from each other on the circle.

Now that you have a complete Story Clock, take a look at your pacing. Are there any gaps? Any sections where too much is crammed together? Does the story look like it’s organized well, or is it messy and scattered? 

Use this as a baseline to determine where there might be opportunities to adjust the pacing, create setups or payoffs, or add/remove detail. Dynamic stories often have consistent, balanced Story Clocks, which showcases a tight narrative that will keep the reader hooked.

Are you ready to work on your full outline? We’ll get into the hows and whys tomorrow. Use hashtag #StoryCraftNovelChallenge to share your Story Clock! We can’t wait to see them.

Happy Writing,

Jess and Theo