Lots of people are spending more time at home right now than they’re used to, and quite a few of them seem to have decided to actually work on writing that novel they’ve had a yen to write for years. The kids and true pantsers sat down and started banging away at the keys – at least, the ones who are confident enough did. Most of the rest have run into problems, the vast majority of which boil down to “I don’t know how to get started.”
This initial roadblock has its roots in the fact that most of the people who are sitting down to attempt to write a novel for the first time are adults, with certain standards and expectations. Adults are used to having most of the basic life skills that their situation requires. We’re not used to being beginners. And writing is a basic life skill, isn’t it? It gets taught in school, for goodness’ sake!
Of course, fiction writing isn’t quite the same as the essay writing we learned in high school. But we are adults, and we are also used to finding directions for things that we don’t already know how to do, and then following them. And lo, there is an Internet just chock full of how-to-write directions…
My guesstimate is that around 95% of the directions out there focus on starting with a plot outline. They all use slightly different approaches to creating that outline, but almost all of them focus on some aspect of plot structure: the Hero’s Journey, the “beat sheet,” three- and four-act construction, and so on. The trouble is that this approach takes a high leap over a really important aspect of the writing process.
Namely, the writing process is individual.
Not every writer starts with plot. Writers who do start with plot usually don’t need to dive right into structure; the basic structural bones are already there in the plot that they have. They need to work on the parts of their story that aren’t as obvious to them, like characters or setting or theme. Writers who don’t start with plot are likely to be vastly frustrated by the assumption that they know where their protagonist is going and the important thing is to structure the protagonist’s journey correctly.
Fiction can start from anywhere – with a plot, a situation, a character (or a set of characters), a place, an image, an idea, a scene, a what-if, a theme, some combination of two or more of these. Different writers tend, in my experience, to have a bias toward one type of story-seed-crystal; that is, Writer A mostly starts with situations (“Two elderly women sitting at a café, discussing how to murder their daughters-in-law”), Writer B usually begins with what-ifs (“What if someone invented hang gliders in 237 B.C.E.?”), while Writer C always begins with a setting/culture (“What place/time sounds interesting? Hmm, I don’t know much about Ancient Greece…”).
Some starting points require that the writer do a whole lot of research next, before they’ll be able to come up with believable characters or plot ideas – setting a novel in Ancient Greece, for instance. Other starting points need characters, or backstory, or plot as the next step.
And different writers don’t take the same “next step,” even if they start from the same story-seed-crystal. Many writers start with a character. Conventional wisdom seems to be to immediately ask “What does this character want/need? Why don’t they have it yet? How will they get it?” as a way of generating plot … but lots of character-writers don’t jump straight to plot. Some move from the protagonist to developing their network of relationships – who they know, like, hate, admire, despise. Others move from character to situation – where the protagonist lives, what the culture is like, what their job is. Still others move on to the character’s backstory and from there to the history of the country they live in. For many writers, plot doesn’t start showing up until the middle, or even the end, of making up everything else.
So the first thing to remember is, There Is No One True Way To Write. You don’t have to start with a character, a plot, a theme, or anything else. You also don’t have to develop things in any particular order. The somewhat unfortunate corollary to this is that There Is No Guaranteed Recipe. You are very likely going to thrash around for a while before you stumble across whatever works for you – and What Works For You is probably not going to be much like What Works for your favorite author, your best friend, your writing teacher, or any of the members of your critique group.
You may, however, save yourself some time if you stop and think about the kinds of books you like to read and the kinds of story ideas you have. (I am assuming that if you want to write a novel, you have one or more things that you want to write about. If you really just want to write any old novel, no idea what, then I don’t think I can help you.) What appeals to you in the stories you read is highly likely to be the easiest road into developing a story you want to write. If your favorite books are heavy on character development, and your story-seed-crystal is “somebody stumbles into the Library of Alexandria that the elves rescued when they left the human world,” then the next step in developing your story is likely to be working out who the protagonist is; if what you remember best about stories is the fascinating settings, then the next step may be working out the backstory of the library or researching the real-life Library of Alexandria.
If plot is what you get first (or second), and/or if structure is one of your weaknesses, it may be worth exploring some of the plotting systems. They have to work for somebody; maybe that’s you. But if you struggle with them, or feel cramped, or if you keep getting distracted by a neat character/scene/backstory bit/etc., go ahead and follow that. It doesn’t matter what order you do stuff in, as long as it all works together when you get it done.
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I start with cool idea or better yet a fistful of cool ideas. (Setting or character-type ideas, usually.) I then absolutely need an ending and a set of waypoints before I start writing unless the story is a very short “look at this cool idea!” story without any real plot.
And it took me decades to figure this out, during which time I spun my wheels as far as story-writing went.
It didn’t help that my answer to “Are you a pantster or a plotter?” is “Neither. Both. Somewhere in between. I feel like a pantster when I try to plot, and like a plotter when I try to pants.”
Another exceptional entry!
“It may not work for you” might be the best advice there is for a writer. When I started accumulating what became my “How to Write” conglomeration, I began with some specifics that I don’t think anyone is going to argue are ***usually*** pretty absolute: don’t *unthinkingly* write your whole story in passive voice, use tight-writing techniques, that kind of thing. (Don’t write in bureaucratese was my most common mantra…)
But it’s too easy, especially all those years of teaching (technical) writing to go on sounding authoritative, which may be where some of these systems come from. I can sympathize – but “it may not work for you” still remains true.
Actually, I’ll argue against the “tight-writing techniques” (assuming that means what it sounds like). I love me some long, complex sentences; you’ll pry my semicolons from my cold, dead hands after you shotgun my brain-eating zombie head off. And I pretty much let the words sprawl out wherever they want to go while I’m writing — and very rarely have to trim them back later.
But then, the thing I respond to most as a reader is the quality of the prose. So as a writer, that’s where my process starts. Which just goes to show that there really is no One True Way.
Though I might agree with you about the bureaucratese. 😉
Tight writing is not wasting words. Instead of “make plans” (a weak noun-verb combination), just “plan”; instead of “in order to”, just “to” (if there won’t be ambiguity). That sort of thing. Also, note semicolon. 😉
Long, complex sentences are fine. Sentences that use twice as many words as necessary, not so much.
In other words, don’t worry about it. 🙂
Well, every writer has his/her own relationship with semicolons. Given my head, I write long rambling sentences with lots of commas, dependent clauses, and at least one semicolon apiece. Then I go back and see if wherever there’s a semicolon I can eliminate it and turn the result into two separate sentences. Usually I can.
Ooh, I am going to argue with that, then. (Sorry!) Different characters (and, hey, different authors) have different voices; therefore, not all of those voices can be perfectly, identically linguistically efficient. (Mine certainly isn’t, and I refuse to prune it into a facsimile of someone else’s voice, although I’ll admit that I could safely cut back on the adverbs.)
Sometimes, linguistic efficiency thoroughly wrecks the tone of a sentence. I have an author friend who keeps pointing out that “have to” and “must” are synonyms, and “must” uses fewer words, so “must” is better! To which I mentally reply that if I made all of my characters (and myself, as the narrator) use “must” where they/I really meant “have to,” the entire book would sound weirdly, constantly formal and insistent, and that rarely fits the characters’ personalities or intentions.
(I’ll also argue on behalf of bureaucratese if you’re writing the dialogue of a bureaucrat who cannot or will not stop themselves from speaking in their institution’s buzzwords.)
Hey, no worries. After I posted that comment, I thought I ought to have included an illustration. Because the thing with tight writing is that a little “loose” writing is never a problem, a whole lot of it is.
Compare:
I, that is I myself, in fact have a clearly compelling requirement to endeavor and even strive, actually, to cease and desist in engaging in so much loud and strident vocalization at virtually every moment of virtually every day, when it comes down to it.
versus:
I need to stop yelling all the time.
Obviously pompous people won’t have their dialog follow tight writing. The thing is, when you compare the above, would you, or other readers, really want to endure an entire novel written in “loose” writing? All those redundancies (endeavor and strive), weak noun-verb combinations (engage in vocalization), and throwaways (in fact, actually, when it comes down to it)?
If you don’t think this is a big deal or realistic, you’re right – in my experience with fiction writing, that is. I’ve never run into it as a significant problem with anyone writing stories.
But people in the gummint? Writing all those lonnnnng, utterly unreadable documents? Oh my goodness…
Sometimes, linguistic efficiency thoroughly wrecks the tone of a sentence.
*fistbump*
(I actually did write a story with bureaucratese-dialog once, for pretty much that reason. I ended up having to tone down the buzzwords quite a bit as compared to the real-life example I was working from, to make it even remotely believable.)
Yep, that’s what I thought it was. The thing is, while “make plans” and “plan” mean approximately the same thing, they don’t mean exactly the same thing. There’s a slightly different meaning, different nuance, different tone. And, of course, different rhythm, which since I’m all about the feel/sound/flow of the language, is a very big deal to me.
And it’s not just my own writing. Usually when I see how-to-write examples that advocate tightening one’s prose, I like the before much better than the after. Your own example below is exaggerated enough that sure, even I wouldn’t choose the longer version, but given a more realistic case, I’ll nearly always pick the untightened version.
Or, to express it in tight writing, “Define necessary.” 🙂
Someone once told me, “People do not speak in semicolons”, and that struck a resonant chord in me. Since then, I’ve used semicolons in narration, but never in dialogue.
I only have one problem with that advice; I do speak in semicolons. 🙂
I should have clarified that, where a semicolon might be called for in dialogue, I use an em-dash. It serves the same function but somehow looks more dialoguey—at least to me.
Thanks for this! I’m pretty familiar with my creative process these days, but all of the above helped me look at it from a slightly different angle, which may be useful going forward. More knowledge seems like a good thing! 😀
I usually start with setting/culture, which requires world building and varying degrees of research.
From there, I think: hmm, that culture would yield this situation which interests me.
The plot and the characters unfold from the situation. That’s the point at which I create a skeletal outline and do some serous thinking about my protag, their relationships, their aspirations, and their daily life.
Now, you might think from that progression that the thing I remember most vividly when I read are settings, but no. It’s true that I love fascinating settings, but I have two priorities as a reader: 1) good character development, and 2) an interesting and compelling plot. If either of those is lacking, I feel unsatisfied.
As a writer, I just happened to get the skill of world building “for free” as they say. And much as I love good character development in my reading, I have to work hard at that when I’m writing. It’s not that the character is not fully developed in my mind: he or she is. But getting that character out of my mind onto the page is a challenge—too much tends to stay in my mind without ever making it to the page. My first readers have been invaluable at pointing out what is missing. My hat is off to them, because it is much harder to see what is missing than it is to see a mistake that is present.
Note</strong: The above is my usual process, but some stories make themselves known via some other process. So far, I’ve been able to roll with the punches, as it were, following my intuition.
I tend to have a character or characters pop up in my head first; from there I usually figure out their situation and any other characters immediately connected to them. The plot is a matter of feeling things out as I write, although I often have snippets of dialogue or description that I’m working toward.
I generally start with a moment which may not even be a full scene. Sometimes something even slighter.
But putting as many of them as I can in one story helps.
“What works for one person may not work for the next”, is selling the frustration short. The maddening thing about process is what works for one novel may not work for the next.