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Do you use Scapple? What do you use it for? If you have any tips you’d like to share with other authors, please feel free to do so in the comments below! I use Scapple for lots of other things too, which are not related to writing my books. I created this one for Velvet, who is the main character in the Earth Angel Series. Scapple Use #5: To Create Character ProfilesĪgain, this is a post-writing exercise for me, but Scapple is quite useful for creating character profiles, to keep track of their background, appearance, likes and dislikes etc. Obviously you could add dates to this and other details if you wanted to, I just needed a basic layout so I could remember who was who. Here’s the family tree I created for The Doorway to PAM: When I used to mind map on paper with a pencil, I would end up with an endless number of versions as I made mistakes, rubbed things out, wanted to move things around etc. What I love is that you can create a huge, complicated mind map, then just highlight, copy and paste some of the boxes into a new document, and then create a new one just featuring that detail. You can join the boxes with dotted lines or arrows, you can add images too (though it does seem to make it a bit slow to work with if the images are a very high-resolution). Though Scapple only has very basic tools, you can make the text boxes different colours, different shapes, and different sizes. If your story spans several generations, or just has a particularly complicated story line involving different families, then creating family trees to keep track of who’s who can be quite useful. If not, you can use Scapple to create a chapter summary, which will help in the editing stage if you need to add extra things in, or move things around, or just check the continuity. If you use Scrivener, then you can use the corkboard feature to keep track of what’s going on in each Chapter, and you can see quite easily how long each chapter is, to make sure that they’re similar lengths.
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Scapple Use #3: To Create a Chapter Summary The timeline below was created after writing The Elphite, as you can see, I have incorporated Scapple Use #3 in this too. Plotters would probably create the outline before writing, but being a pantser, I like creating it afterwards, when I’m in the editing stage, so I know that the story makes sense. Whether you are a plotter or a pantser, creating a timeline is essential if you’re to keep track of the events in your story.
#Using scapple to make a novel outline how to#
As you can see, I am not a plotter, and therefore have no idea what should be on one, but here is a basic idea of how to create one. And then as the story progresses, you can add in any changes or deviations or subplots as you go along.
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Scapple is a digital mind mapping tool, so it makes sense that if you are a plotter, you could use it to create a visual outline of your book. Created by Literature & Latte, the same folk who brought us Scrivener (which will feature in another post), Scapple is a super simple, yet beautifully useful tool that I personally think is essential for authors. One of my favourite tools that I discovered last year was Scapple.