This is Part 3 of 6 of my Everything Before Gia series. Click the link to learn more about my debut novel, or return to Part 2.

I needed chapters to move the project forward. The timeline was an improvement from the scrapbooks but it still wasn't intuitive or convenient or portable as a writing aid. This is how I did it.

The first step was to recreate the physical timeline in a digital format that could be printed and annotated. To accelerate the process I used the search feature to copy material from the original plot point spreadsheet. The ribbon marked my progress.

The new timeline was colour-coded to distinguish each major location within the novel. It was printed across 14 sheets.

I generated over 100 chapter titles and printed my top 20.

The best chapter titles were able to consolidate each region of the timeline, both thematically and poetically. The rest were discarded.

These are some working titles. Pencil annotations detail the process of distributing plot points between chapter groupings.

The digital timeline was reconfigured according to my pencil annotations. Each page of plot points represents a newly formed chapter! By now, the colours were nothing more than decoration.

Nearly a year had passed since the scrapbooks were finalised. Still, I continued to develop new ideas and I needed a new way to organise my notes.

These new ideas were were individually cut and taped into a 'chapter book' alongside relevant chapter notes.

Here is a sample page from the finished chapter book. Originally there were 33 chapters and one prologue, but the prologue was eventually scrapped. This notebook was extremely helpful because it allowed me to annotate my material for the first time since the project began two years prior.

So I got started on a third redraft of the novel. I made more progress than I had in the past, but I still didn't feel ready. I decided to write chapter summaries instead.

Click here to view part 4 of the Everything Before Gia novel series!