My Outline

Using a little bit of everything I came up with my plot. First off, I'd written a draft in November for NaNo. I plotted then by writing scenes on notecards. I incorporated way too much back story, but I've been able to salvage some of it for the rewrite. I also realized that the story wasn't as dark as I wanted it. So I add another villian. Originally there was a supervillian and a villian the heroine was after. Enter villian who is after heroine. Now all these villians work together or not as the plot dictates. Also, I needed my hero to have a more compelling reason to tell her to stay with her. And it had become a bit too date like, which for the story I wanted to tell was not the proper format. So plotting exercise two:

First I storyboarded my first novel with poster board and Post-its. This allowed me to go back through the entire story and figure out where things could be added. Well, this is when I realized the story just wasn't the story for this novel. From the Snowflake Method, I knew my one sentence (it was my original idea). The next step is to form a paragraph from that sentence with about five sentences. The next step was about characters which had me going around the internet looking for clues. I could figure out my characters goals, motivations, and conflicts, but they were all plot related. Not so much on the internal conflict. So, from the internet I found Dark Erotica and read a dozen articles in a few days. I couldn't decide whether to use spreadsheet or notecards or Word.

In the end I used a Word outline form and listed these things:
Inciting Event - Denial
Crisis - Anger
Climax/Reversal - Despair
Ordeal - Sacrifice
Confrontation - Acceptance

I put each of my five scenes from the Snowflake as the beginning scene of each event. From there I used the second word or the five stages of grief to work where each character was with their internal conflict and built scenes that would lead to the next big event. Every scene has a purpose. Under each scene I would write what I wanted to accomplish with that scene. So now when I'm working with my story, I have open my book plot outline, my first draft, and the new novel document. If I find something I want to keep from the old draft, I cut and paste and revise to go with the new story line. I've kept the same scenes from the first four chapters but am rewriting them.