Read A Detailed Plan of Our Monster Book

Exciting news - our detailed monster book plan is here. This will tell you all the plot developments that will happen in our book. Warning - it also tells you how it ends!

Download Our Monster Book - Detailed Plan

Here are some notes about the plan.

What’s a Plan and Why Do We Need One?

This is the plan that we will use to write our book. The book will be at least five times as long as the plan because I will explain how things happen as well as what happens. I will add dialogue and description to help explain situations, add more humour and build suspense.

Writers make detailed plans before they start writing because complicated stories like ours are hard to plot. You often have to go back and change bits.

For example, I got to the end of the plan and realised that I’d forgotten to find a way to get rid of Summer Slimyspikes. This meant that I had to go back and change part of the plot. It’s much easy to change a plan than it is to change a book, because a plan is shorter.

Sometimes, even when you have a plan, you can end up making continuity errors. For example, lumipoo momps can only say ‘momp’ unless they eat things with words on. So if I made a lumipoo momp speak English without first eating something with those words on, that would be a continuity error.

Let me know if you spot any continuity errors in our plan.

The division of chapters might change, because it is impossible to know how long each section will be until you start writing, but this gives a rough design.

The other advantage of the detailed plan is that you will have enough information to get started on your illustrations before the book is finished.

Don’t Worry About Typos

There may be a few typos but that doesn’t matter in a plan. The important thing about a plan is the get all the ideas down.

The only people who see an author’s plan are people helping to write the story, so it doesn’t have to be as tidy and the final book, which could be read by thousands of people.

Points of View

There are two popular types of narrative in books: first person and third person.

First person is where you write as if you are one of the characters (e.g. ‘I am Simon. I went for a walk.’).

Third person is where you talk about the character (e.g. ‘Simon went for a walk.’).

First person is useful when you have one main character who appears throughout the whole book, but we have many main characters and the action switches between them. Simon doesn’t know how Toby gains his powers. Toby isn’t there when Simon rescues Tig. So one character can’t narrate our monster book as there’s nobody who witnesses all the action.

Third person allows us to tell a story from many points of view. (e.g. ‘Chapter 1: Simon thought about Shoogle Lagoon.’, ‘Chapter 2: Professor Tackytesttubetumble was busy thinking about science.’ So we are going to write in the third person.

When you write a complicated story in the third person it’s a good idea to pick one character to focus on in each section.

I’ve jotted down the POV for each section to remind me which character I’m focussing on, but they will all be told in third person.

How to Say ‘Lumipoo Momp’

Tip: Lumipoo is pronounced like ‘luminous poo’ but without the ‘nous’.

Name Changes

I’ve changed Adam and Melissa’s names to Thugodore and Thia because I wanted something that sounds more thuggish.

I’ve changed Turbo the Toddler to Toby the Turbo Toddler. The reason is that I only just found out that there’s a recent film with a main character called Turbo, so I’ve changed ours slightly so that it’s different.