Today I got an email from a student who begged me to help her with what she called a “tangled ball of events and scenes” she needed to put together to form a book-length work. What, she asked, was my advice?
Writing Tip for Today: If you aren’t writing your book in chronological order, how do you unite the elements into a cohesive story?

• Story Board! My first bit of advice would be to make a story board, either a rough approximate of the entire story, or a more detailed one. As we’ve discussed here, a story board is an excellent way to gauge whether your manuscript has too many scenes in critical places, leading to redundancy, or too few, resulting in plot holes. You can rearrange events if they make more sense introduced sooner or later. At the very least, try to construct a timeline for your story. Remember, you can change the story board any way you think is necessary in order to achieve a story that escalates tension all the way to the climax.
• Stack Your Scenes with Subplots. Put your “exciting” scenes in order from least tense to most tense. Now, imagine two subplots (story lines that enrich the story but don’t overpower it) and look for places along the Timeline where you can insert scenes about the subplots. Be careful though. If you go too far afield of the main plot, your reader will wonder what happened and/or become bored.
• Resist the Urge to Cherry Pick. Sometimes, a story’s connecting scenes that are lulls in the main action can seem less attractive to write than the flat-out action scenes. If you write all the “good stuff” first, you’ll be stuck writing those less important connective scenes.