Yes, I own other software that is designed for plotting, BUT I would like to move every stage of my work into Papyrus 12.
Has anyone found methods of plotting in Papyrus that they’d care to share?
My normal workflow for mysteries:
Come up with a starter idea/victim/murder.
Create suspects and motives.
Link suspects to the victim and each other.
List any secrets they may hold.
Begin brainstorming potential scenes for the story.
Arrange those into a loose narrative.
See if it works.
Revise it and create a good starting outline.
Others’ brains may work differently.
(For Fantasy novels, I have no issues as I just write them and let my creative mind drive the story along, since they are basically thrillers. For mysteries, I need certain facts, like those above, so they make sense for the readers/genre expectations.)
I’m not much of a plotter, so my advise may not be super helpful, but I find Papyrus 12 to have a lot of features that would be helpful to meet your requirements.
In your planning stage, keep all the info related to the story you are planning in a file that would become one of the associated documents when you get to the writing stage and create a project. Papyrus allows a lot of associated files to be added to a project to take care of such things.
During this stage, create the character and object databases (more if you have the need). Info regarding characters etc can go into those. So that, you get your outline and just the outline in front of you. Mouseover will show you all the relevant info when you need them. Go on adding more characters and populating those databases.
Keep extra info/notes in comments, that you can read along the text. (also, reply to the comments is helpful).
Break that outline into chapters and scenes by using either the scene/event headers or creating your own text styles. Latter works for me but the benefit of scene/event if that, you can easily switch them around and experiment (as you’ve required).
As for keeping all the relevant info in one place and within visibility, you can use the scene/event headers for keeping extra info. Additionally you can use sticky notes both in the pinboard areas as well as page margins. If you are writing a sequel or a spin-off story for one or multiple earlier work of yours, Global Notes file is super helpful (which can be used in other ways as well). Fetch relevant data from those files to Global Notes for quick access.
In the meantime, use the Thinkboards to plan and plot the story. Really good for people who ideate visually. You may want to create one additional Thinkboard just for keeping track of all the alternative versions of the story that you are considering (and those you have already discarded). Sort of like a kanban board.
Additionally, Track Changes feature can be helpful to keep track of how you are modifying the idea. You may choose to use Ghost texts in juxtaposition with Track Changes for this purpose.
When you are done plotting and ready for writing your novel, just create a new file for it, add it to the project, and make that file the main file of the project. Customize in the Documents Set and Associated Files menu, so that your plotting file and writing file (and other relevant documents) opens and closes simultaneously.
All the above points may not be suitable for your personal workflow. In which case you can improvise just by playing around with these and other features and check which ones suits your need (or the need of that particular novel).
I will work through those ideas and try applying them to my methods.
You mentioned several points there I hadn’t considered. Setting up a dummy project and experimenting should help me learn them.
Having a weird brain is annoying, as plotting is the thing I find hardest. It’s not always logical, but I have to drag the facts out for mysteries since it’s tricky to create a sensible puzzle otherwise.