RUNNERS Story Wall Finished!!
Huzzah! I’m officially done breaking the main story points for the remaining 8 books of my RUNNERS series. Here’s what that looks like, with post-its color-coded by character/event:
Kinda like the last image, but now with more post-its to mark gruesome character deaths. Just kidding. Or am I?? Definitely very exciting to know where everything is going, plot- and character-wise. And I really like that feeling of, “I can’t wait for people to get to this scene in Book 3! And then this reveal in Book 4! And then this sequence and plot turn in Book 5!” etc etc. It’s definitely a much better feeling than, “I just finished an arc. I wonder what the next one will be about.”
Anyway, the toughest work is now done. Now on to fleshing out Book 3 in full detail and script…
In the meantime, please feel free to keep posting book reviews on Amazon and Good Reads at the links from my previous post, if you haven’t already. And follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr (@seanwangart), where I will be posting artwork every day next month for Inktober, the majority of which will be alien and starship concepts for the upcoming series.
It’s been a very light RUNNERS schedule the past few years as I focused on freelance work, but things are ramping up, so stay tuned!
Oh, very exciting! I can’t wait to read book three.
Best of luck to you, Sean!
Thanks!! Book 3 will be a fun one: introducing another entirely new crew to the mix!
*Zooms in and squints really, really, reeeeeaaaalllly hard to see if any of the text on the post-it notes can be read*
*NOPE*
CURSE YOU SEAN! You’re too clever for me! Gueeeess I’ll just have to be patent, lol =p
But seriously! Congrats on the progress!
While working on the animated short back in DAVE school, RUNNERS seriously got me out of a bad art/inspiration block, and I’m DEFINITELY excited to see this inspirational world and its characters expand again! (And to see just how HORRIBLY my current headcanons and fanfiction ideas will fall apart, haha XP)
Keep up the awesome work Sean! Can’t wait to see what you do for this year’s Inktober! 8D
Ha ha. Yeah, I had to make extra sure everything was blurry before posting. You wouldn’t want to read the story in post-it form anyway! Thanks for the kind words. It’s always nice when people are reading the series at all, but to know that it has affected and inspired them in some way is amazing!
Would you mind explaining the color coding / organization? I am struggling major with organizing all of my plots and subplots and character choices. If this is somewhere else on your site already I apologize and you can ignore me.
Hi Chelsea! Sorry for the slow response, but holiday season is always even more hectic than the usual schedule. But I love the question and will try to answer as best I can.
With my story wall, each vertical white sheet was for one book volume, so that wall encompasses 8 books. Ack! I used a different color for each main (and sometimes secondary) character and certain story arcs. So my character Sky (who has a LOT of story to tell) might be a dark blue color, another character Roka may be purple, etc. That way, I could develop a character’s complete arc over the span of the entire series and make sure all the key events were in the proper order.
I remember hearing something very interesting way back with the writers of Terminator 3. They decided to kill off Linda Hamilton’s character between movies because they felt like her character arc from movie 1 to movie 2 was complete, leaving them nowhere to go in a third outing. I remember some saying Han Solo had the same thing happen, with his arc occurring between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. So for Return of the Jedi, he really had no arc and was just there to crack jokes. Bearing that in mind, I wanted my characters’ arcs to hit their conclusions at the end of the series and not tap out too soon. So the post-it juggling was a way of seeing what story they would get in each volume while also making sure the main arc was happening (and being properly set up over the course of all books to occur) at the end.
As a big epic war story with multiple factions, I was also using different colors to chart each faction’s involvement in the story: what they contribute to the story and when, how there involvement then affects the other characters and factions in the story, and how their stories resolve as well. Given the number of intertwined cogs, it was helpful to have the post-its I could move between books (moving some sooner or later), since in many cases, an event would HAVE to happen earlier in order for the cascade effect to then take place in subsequent books. So planning when everything happens was pretty important.
If you look closely at the image, you’ll see the occasional half-and-half post-it, like one that is half pink and half green. In those cases, the pink and green characters’ stories dovetail into each other.
What’s nice about the colors is that when reviewing a character’s storyline, I only needed to really look for that particular color on the wall. Otherwise, I would’ve had to reread every single post-it to find the one I was looking for. So the colors helped me zero in on a specific character when I wanted to.
Not sure if any of that was what you were looking for. If not, please feel free to send more questions my way, and I’ll see if I can help. But the main gist is that I used a single color post-it for each character (or key story element) and just let it snowball from there.