Motivation is a key factor when it comes to creating a story because while coming up with a general plot and characters for you story can be loads of fun, actually sitting down and having to write every scene/piece of dialogue for your book can seem a like a chore. Personally, it doesn’t matter how much of a story I’ve already drafted in my head; I still end up procrastinating. I even skirt gingerly around my desk when I spot my laptop. I feel as though it’s staring at me, scolding me for not writing. 😛 So, how do we get down to business? Well, there are many, many ways to go about this but I’ll start with one of my favorite/most effective methods. I call it: “Month by Month”.

The “Month by Month” method involves the use of a table. The one I created was through Microsoft Word. The table has two columns: one titled “Months”, the other titled “Major and Minor Events”. There are 12 rows. In the months column you would fill each of the 12 rows within that section with the months of the year. Then, in the events column, depending on when certain events take place within your story, you would fill in the story’s sequence of events. What’s great about this is that you basically have an outline for your story when you are done and because it’s online, if you happen to think of new events you want to add or simply want to reorder events, you can! It’s super easy. Once you have your “Month by Month” outline complete, you now have a comprehensive list of all the different scenes you need to write to complete your story. From there, it’s just write a scene and check it off until you get through the whole table. When I was doing NaNoWriMo (National November Writing Month), I used this method and I can tell you: IT WAS AMAZING! I got so much more done for my CCR novel than I ever thought I was capable of (MAJOR shout out to the Lord for giving me the energy and the determination to make it through the month). Sometimes I would go straight down the list writing scenes and sometimes I would jump to a scene that I felt more motivated to write than others. More often than not, I would just start a scene, (I wrote about 500 words or so for each, sometimes less) and then moved on, checking off the scenes as I went so that I least I knew I had started all of them. Now all I have to do is go back and finish the scenes! (Plus making smooth transitions, fixing minor details, adding a few new scenes, and oh yea…EDITING!!!) But the point is, the “Month by Month” method really helped me put my fingers to the keyboard so I hope it will help you too! Here’s a screenshot of the basic template I created. I used individual colors for each of the months to make the separation between months easier to see. Also, I’m just one of those people who associations colors to people, names, and stuff like that. 😛 Anyways, I hope this works for you!