I was writing stuff for an RPG during class, today, and accidentally stumbled on something interesting. Certain games I've played have had chapter names assigned to various points in the gameplay. Chrono Trigger did that to the save games, it had a brief little 'title' describing what you were doing. "The Chancellor" if you were doing the part where you find out about the chancellor, for instance :p I wanted to try this out as a way of better organizing the story, so, I came up with a bunch of blurbs; some relating to specific points in the story, but some also relating to general themes, specific points I wanted to address, references to other material, metaphors, etc. Not anything huge, maybe six word sequences at the most. After reading out the list, and looking at it as a whole, I started to see new patterns in what I was writing, stuff that maybe I was subconsciously getting at. Not only that, but the list gave me some "seeds" to work from, regarding levels, plot points, etc. Anyone care to try?

It isn't that new an idea; just off the top of my head I can bring to mind George Martin's stories, where the chapters were titled according to the character they centered on, and going much further back the Hugh Lofting stories of Doctor Doolittle, where each chapter name was a one line blurb summary ("A Message From Africa", "Polynesia and the King", etc.)

I do it behind the scenes when I write; each chapter I try to start out with a short two or three sentence summary of the chapter to help me keep organized.

It's a lot easier than looking at "Chapter 8" and trying to remember what you wanted to accomplish there ;)

I've used this method somewhat too. For one piece of work i'm writing, I've got a handful of chapter titles that will be used eventually. I find it's helpful when you're loking down the road a ways at what you want to write, but don't have the specifics yet. I'll come up with a chapter title that encompasses a general theme I want to cover, and I throw it in the pile with the rest of the titles. It also helps to give you a target to write toward. It can give you a little bit more of an idea of where you need to go with the writing.

I've been playing around with old elementary school techniques as far as writing goes, recently. I don't really know if it's for the better or not, but writing out a flow chart comes up with a similar effect. Not only will a flowchart facilitate that "key point" development brainstorming, but it also allows you to easily draw in branches as well and construct a non-linear story with multiple endings if that's really what you want to do. I think the "building block at a time" approach to writing a story is really better for me personally as a whole rather than the approach I learned early in highschool which is to write out the whole arc and flesh it out later. Maybe we just work better plowing blindly into the unknown, Beige :D Anyway, something you may be interested in is finding a list of all the basic types of scenarios you can use in storywriting and play with that like legos, that way you can really decide what works best for each "beat" or "blurb."

-astral
"after about three hours, he finally realized the ultimate goal of the beat chart: to draw a snowman made of stories."