The Weighing House is an invented novel set in 1911 in Hollin
Staithe, a market town on the edge of the fens. Nell Orrin, twenty, keeps the
town's public scales after her father's stroke. The Drainage Board wants to
cut a channel through Wash Fen, the common land where the poorest families
dig peat and set eel traps. (Its first Canvas is on
the Canvas page.)
Chapter seven is where the book turns. Here are the beats the writer types
into the Outline:
Beats, as typed
Nell's first market day alone. Pryor brings the Board's barley and asks
for the old half-hundredweight. The loads come in light. She checks the
ledgers, tests the weight in town, finds it filed. She takes it to her
father, who can't speak. That night the bell rings for the sluice and Kit
is out on the fen.
Scene count: six. Below is the plan after the writer has worked on it. We
wrote these scenes to show the shape a good plan takes; what Generate scenes
gives you for your own book will differ, and you will change it too.
Scene 1
The beam sticks. Dawn, and Nell opens the Weighing House
alone for the first time. The beam sticks; she oils the pivot the way
her father did, talking to him in her head. Kit comes in wet to the knees:
surveyors' stakes went in across Wash Fen overnight.
Scene 2
Forty sacks of barley. Mr Pryor arrives with the Board's
carts and asks for "the half-hundredweight your father always used." Nell
weighs forty sacks bought from Wash Fen families. Every one comes in
light. Pryor watches her write the figures and thanks her for her care.
Scene 3
The ledger press. At noon, door shut, Nell reads back
through the ledgers. The Board's loads have been light for six years. The
oldest entries are in her father's hand. The newest are in hers, made
without knowing.
Scene 4
Four ounces. She carries the weight to Haddow's, the
ironmonger, and sets it against his sealed pounds. Four ounces short.
Haddow looks at the filed base, then at her, and says that nothing will
be said in his shop.
Scene 5
Her father's hand. At home, her father lies propped by
the window, unable to speak. She puts the weight on the blanket by his
good hand. His fingers close round it and will not open, and she cannot
tell whether he is asking her to forgive him or to keep it hidden.
Scene 6
Two strokes. Past midnight the town bell rings twice. The
sluice at Denny's Gote is open, water is going onto Wash Fen, and Kit has
his traps out. Nell works the weight free of her sleeping father's hand,
puts it in her coat and runs.
Why this plan works
-
Every scene changes something. Nell goes from suspecting
nothing, to suspecting the Board, to knowing her father was part of it,
to having to choose.
-
The descriptions name concrete things. The pivot, forty
sacks, four ounces, two strokes of the bell. A scene description with an
object in it is easier to write from, by hand or with Draft Page.
-
The last scene opens the next chapter. The flood is the
question the reader carries over the page break.
Changing the plan
Say the chapter feels rushed between the ironmonger's and home. Use Add scene
after scene four and choose Write blank: Nell walks back along the
staithe with the weight in her apron, and the town looks at her differently,
or she thinks it does. Or say scene three gives the secret away too
soon. Rewrite its description so Nell only finds that the loads were light,
and move the handwriting to scene five, where her father's hand is already
the subject.
For the whole method, from premise to a full scene list, read
how to outline a novel.
