Last night as I was drifting off to sleep an idea sparked in my head for plotting stories in a visual manner. This is not about discovering or working out the plot beats to a story but rather finding a way to show them visually as a potential tool for analysis and revision.

Using a spreadsheet, the idea would be to assign each chapter a value positive of negative for how the events in that chapter have impacted the protagonist for good or ill. Things better for the character would be a positive number and things getting worse would be a negative one with the size of the number reflecting just how much better or worse the event was.

Then these values could be graphed with the X-Axis being the chapter numbers and the Y-Axis the event values. This would produce a line going up with ever ‘good’ turn in the story and descending for every ‘bad’ one. The sections could be further labeled with the acts to see how well the written matches against the expectations of structure.

I’m going to make such a graph after the first draft of my new novel is completed and see just what it tells me, if anything. This idea may be a waste of time or it may be a new and valuable tool. We shall see.