Following the dozen hours Claude recommended I spend on a deep-dive rewriting protagonist Laura Reyes’ story, we now turn to the overhauling the structure.

Structure Overhaul (15% – 18-27 hours)

Objective: Rebuild the manuscript around a three-act structure with Luna at the center.

This is the first big time commitment for this project. A full week’s work.

Core Structure (8-10 hours):

Create a scene-by-scene outline using index cards or Scrivener:

ACT I – THE AWAKENING (Chapters 1-8, ~30,000 words)

• Target: 25% of book
• Timeline: 2043-2046
• Arc: Luna discovers her purpose, commits to liberation, faces first consequences
• Key scenes:
  1. Opening: Luna at grandmother’s funeral (2050) – frame story
  2. Flashback: Luna in garage lab (2043)
  3. The yeast discovery and mapping
  4. Family conflict over her decision
  5. The release and immediate fallout
  6. Corporate response begins
  7. Luna meets her defense team
  8. Preliminary hearing (your existing scene – strengthen it)
• Act I climax: Judge denies injunction but Luna realizes the real war is just beginning

Using index cards is the way to go. There are real advantages to physical media. I’ve was inspired by Scott Scheper’s book Antinet Zettlekasten and played around with this notecard filing system. While I never embraced it for all my reading, I did follow Kathleen Spracklen‘s excellent introductory videos.

Fiction author Victoria Crowder specifically addresses how plot a novel scene by scene with a filing system based on index cards in this video:

ACT II – THE RESISTANCE (Chapters 9-20, ~50,000 words)

• Target: 40-42% of book
• Timeline: 2047-2070
• Arc: Luna builds the movement, faces escalating opposition, experiences personal costs
• Divided into two parts: Part A – Building (Chapters 9-14):
  • Luna founds Global Fermentation Commons
  • Corporate disinformation campaigns
  • Luna’s romantic relationship (create new character – another brewer or lawyer)
  • International expansion
  • Midpoint: A major victory (Luna’s TED talk goes viral, 2062) BUT…

Part B – Crisis (Chapters 15-20):

• Movement faces backlash (culture wars from Episode 11)
• Personal sacrifice: Luna’s relationship fails due to her obsession
• Someone dies because of misunderstanding her work (use the alternative medicine tragedy)
• Luna questions whether she’s caused more harm than good
• Act II climax: Luna considers abandoning the movement entirely (around 2068)

ACT III – THE LEGACY (Chapters 21-28, ~30,000 words)

• Target: 25% of book
• Timeline: 2071-2100
• Arc: Luna finds a new relationship with her work, witnesses unintended consequences, achieves wisdom
• Key scenes:
  1. Luna rebuilds after her dark night
  2. The 28th Amendment (but Luna sees its limitations)
  3. Commercialization threatens to co-opt the movement
  4. Luna trains a new generation (including Christie Steinberg, now grown)
  5. A new crisis requires the movement to prove itself
  6. Luna at 80+ reflects on what was won and lost
  7. Return to opening frame: Why was she at grandmother’s funeral?
  8. Ending: Luna passes her SCOBY to the next generation (literal and metaphorical)

The question I have at this early stage is how closely I should adhere to Claude’s 3-Act outline. While it clearly does a good job in plotting a story arc that takes Luna from her teenage biohacker days to old age, and weaves the highlights of different Episodes into her bio, it’s not the only way of structuring a story.

Indeed, Bristol-based polymath communications executive Jeremy Connell-Waite has outlined 20 different story structures that summarize the techniques used by everyone from Aristotle to Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Campbell. He suggests plugging this resource into generative AI and asking for an analysis of a plot based around a specific page. And it works!

Integration Work (10-12 hours):

• Take your existing 12 episodes and map each scene to this new structure
• Identify which scenes to keep (30%), which to cut (40%), which to completely rewrite (30%)
• Create a “cut file” document for removed material—you may salvage pieces later

Deliverable: A complete chapter-by-chapter outline (3-5 pages) with scene summaries, emotional beats, and subplot tracking.

This process starts with the complete re-read of the material I’ve created an keeping only the content where there’s a strong emotional ‘beat’ and they are key to the theme. This process will be done with the Word document of all Episodes that I submitted to Claude to generate this analysis.

I wonder what the result would be if I turned these steps over to Claude and asked it to act as an ‘author agent’? That might produce results in a few minutes that would take me a week or more to achieve manually. But what’s the fun in that 🙂

Next: Claude turns to working on the supporting characters.