Flashcarding The City of Light - Issues, Troubleshooting, Avoiding Major Edits

I never got the chance to flashcard The City of Light (I was focused on The Pirates of Sissa for quite a while), but now that I am, I'm so glad that I decided to do this.

I'm finding issues with sequence of events, and already considering solutions. And there are elements missing in-between certain plot events, which is really obvious when you look at it from a bird's eye view. And then there are reactive/active scenes, and plot holes that have popped up regarding timeline, and so on.

Example: Someone observes how the mysterious disease works and does end up having a very spot-on theory which they share with Alev. The problem? This doesn't happen until quite late in the story - which isn't an issue in and of itself - but the person makes these observations much earlier on. The flashcards helped me see just how far apart the two events are, when really they should be much closer together. What kept them from telling Alev right away? Why would they have waited that long? Honestly, there's no good reason; so one of the two has to happen:

• the observation (& theory) happens later
• they tell Alev much sooner in the storyline

This is going to end up shifting some other events, but at least it's going to make sense as far as behaviour goes. This is really important to me because sometimes I have characters behave in ways that are convenient to plot but not true to how they would actually behave, and a lot of the times that I've found myself cornered in my own writing, it generally comes from that.

Another example: At some point, Lucius does something that has him branded as a traitor, and it's directly related to the Festival of Light, which is an annual festival held in Valgus. I never had an issue with this plot point, but now that I'm looking at the events in sequence and making sure that they make sense, I'm second-guessing it. Given that the king has just died, does this make sense? Would they hold the festival still, or would they decide not to out of respect for the mourning period? And then, if that's the case, Lucius never does the thing he does, and he never gets branded a traitor... But he still has to end up in the Black Desert, outside of Valgan walls. So the story shifts significantly.

A lot of this is stuff that I would have caught in the revision stage, and laying them out like this probably makes these issues seem glaringly obvious, but it's hard to keep track of it all sometimes, and we overlook things. Catching them early on is helping me avoid major rewrites.

I think that's what I really like about this method, actually. I get to easily identify big issues in the plot (without the clutter of a manuscript, which tends to overwhelm me) and I get to fix those issues directly in the drafting stage. Ideally, if I was a complete plotter, I'd be able to fix the issues before even drafting.

Anyway, highly recommend. You can find my free guide to flashcarding by joining my newsletter if you want to give it a go but aren't sure where/how to get started. Flashcarding is probably one of the easiest-to-use approaches I've stumbled on, so I think every writer can make really good use out of it. 

 

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