Note Card Your Way to a Novel

Good enough for Nabokov. Good enough for you.

Recently it was revealed that Nabokov had written an entire novel (unpublished in his lifetime) on 138 note cards.  A WHOLE novel.  Sometimes I wonder if the reason I struggle is because I try to come at the novel as a whole.  And in trying to remember everything I need to do, all the scenes and dialogue I need to get down, I get stuck. Note cards are a clever and deceptively effective way of laying out plot or character or setting for a novel.  For this post, I’ll focus on using note cards to plot your novel.

Write down your major plot points in your novel, one on each note card.  I’ll use Nabokov’s Lolita as an example of what the some of the major plot points would look like:

• Humbert Humbert moves to Ramsdale to write.  He rents a room in the house of Charlotte Haze.
• Charlotte falls in love with Humbert and presses marriage.
• Humbert becomes obsessed with Charlotte’s daughter Lolita.  He marries Charlotte in order to stay near Lolita.
• Charlotte reads his diary and discovers his obsession.  She makes plans to leave.

Obviously there are a lot more plot points in Lolita, as the plot is complicated, but you can see above that plot points are meant to be very bare boned.  The only question you are answering on these note cards is:  what happens next. The great thing about note cards is that you can tack them to a bulletin board, spread them out on your desk, rearrange them to change your plot.  Maybe certain events need to happen sooner in your novel for example.  Or maybe you’re letting the cat out of the bag too quickly and need to slow your plot down, saving certain plot points for later.  Plot is probably my biggest challenge, so I’m going to try this too.  I’ll let you know how it goes in a follow-up post.  Let me know if this works for you.