Plotter, Pantser, or somewhere in between?

So I've abandoned my blog a little bit recently, between my podcast The Fandom Ramble, and working on my project for Camp NaNoWriMo. Which is actually why I'm writing this blog post, this is the first time I'm plotting my story.

I am not a plotter by nature, I'm normally a hang by the seat of my pants, oh god I have no idea what my characters are doing and why, type of person, but that doesn't normally work. I end up abandoning so many projects because I have one scene in my head, and often instead of just writing that one scene I HAVE to start at the begining, even when I have no idea what the begining is. With my current project I really don't want that. I've fallen in love with this one, and I just feel like this is THE ONE.

This is a world and characters that have been perculating for years in the back of my head. They've featured in the margins of my books from uni, and the pinterest board has been there since my sixth form years (five-ish years ago), it's in no way the story I started with, heck, it's not even the story it was last year, but I love it, and I love learning about it while I'm writing it.

Now, last year I did a lot of research in preperation for NaNoWriMo for story types and formulars, and then I chucked it out the window and wrote what came to me... and then abandoned NaNo when I failed, it's taken me five months to write 29k, and I still haven't written the main body of the story, and have very little knowlege of what's going on.

This time around I'm trying the Three Act Structure, and I actually think I know what's going on. This structure is (obviously) broken down into three parts, the first act is ten "scenes" long, act two is twenty and the third and final act is ten scenes. So far I've outlined seventeen scenes, which is all of the first act, four from act two and three from act three. Hopefully I'm not bombarding you with numbers... but for the first time I know how this ends (and it's a stinker, I'm going to apologise now), and I have some idea how my multiple points of view interact with eachother. 

I've also found that post it notes somewhat work from me. I'm a very visual learner, I ideally need to see things laid out in front of me to understand it, and colour coded post it notes apparently do it for me. I've got five colours, Yellow = character 1, Blue = character 2, Pink = character 3, Green = character 4, and Orange = world events that aren't character related. My only problem with this system is that I don't always work in the same place and they live on my wardrobe doors, the other reason is that my eyesight isn't great, and even if I am working near them I have to stand right in front of them to read them, which isn't that great. However! I had a cunning plan, I'm using a combination of coloured post it notes, Notion and my bullet journal.

Let's talk about Notion. I came across this brilliant website and app in my writing research, and it's changed my life (not an understatement). Notion is a website taht can pretty much do everything, I'm using it as a wiki for my story. It has everything from character profiles, research and my check list for my structure. My only problem with the check list is that I can't do numbered bullet points as well as a little checkbox for each point, but that's where my bujo comes in!