Greg asked Katharine McGee:

Can you share how you manage the plot, characters, etc. of your story? I have finished The Thousandth Floor trilogy and loved it. I write for fun, as an outlet, and have difficulty managing many characters and intertwining plots despite having some fun ideas I would like to write. What software do you use? I love having a look behind the scenes of work I admire, thank you!

Katharine McGee As a reader, I’ve always been drawn to big, fat books with lots of intersecting stories. (I grew up on high fantasy—stories like Lord of the Rings, that jump back and forth from one cluster of characters to another). There’s nothing I love more than opening a novel and finding a family tree or a map: signs that this is a sweeping, epic story, and I’d better buckle up and pay attention. So I always knew that when I wrote books of my own, they would be narrated by more than one character. I just find that it makes the world feel richer and more textured when you see it through multiple sets of eyes.

My characters are tangled together in all kinds of ways, so I do a lot of outlining before I start writing. I use a whiteboard to figure out the main beats of the story, then get onto my computer to do an actual chapter-by-chapter outline, color-coded and all! Inevitably the story will change once I start drafting, but it’s helpful to have a roadmap that I can keep flipping back to.

flag