Putting one foot in front of other gets you somewhere, but if you don’t look where you are stepping you can end up in quicksand – or worse yet, wandering over a cliff.
This rather obvious truism has been on my mind because of a writing website someone recommended last week. It’s one of the many, many current sites that argue that you should plan, plan, plan before you ever start writing. The blogger summarizes no less than nine different planning-and-structure systems (one of which is Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey,” and at least two others are obvious variations on it). And those nine don’t cover everything – I can think of two right off the top of my head that she left out.
Most bloggers of the “plan, plan, plan” persuasion argue that if you lay everything out in advance, the actual writing part is a breeze. You just follow the extremely detailed outline you have written, putting one foot in front of the other. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help when there’s road construction, a 40-mile detour due to flooding, an unexpected cliff or impassable mountain smack dab in the center of your chosen route, etc.
The plan-everything bloggers argue that if the writer has done a proper job of planning (usually according to their system), they will have found out about the road construction, floods, cliffs, and other barriers and planned how to get around them. All I can say is, those people have never gone on a cross-country road trip.
Furthermore, there is a lot more variation in writing processes than just whether one wings it or plans everything out meticulously. The planner-pantser division is not either-or; it’s a range. Most of us are somewhere in the mushy middle, planning some things and winging it for other things.
My experience with novelizing three of the Star Wars scripts does mean I have to agree that having all the scenes, dialog, and plot twists laid out in advance allows for faster writing. However, even that wasn’t as tidy as one might expect. I was writing those books about nine months before they came out, which means that all the shooting was supposed to be finished and they were into post-production … and things were still changing. I spent a chunk of my Christmas holiday “revising” – adding a scene that hadn’t been there before and rearranging bits of dialog to match the most recent changes. And when the movie came out, there were a lot of things that still didn’t match, because they kept fiddling with it for months after I’d had to turn my manuscript in so it could be typeset.
Books are like that. Working from an already-written script was far more planning than even the most rigorous system I’ve seen advocated (that would be one of the ones – there are several – that advocate a scene-by-scene breakdown of the book, complete with word counts, the main character’s goal/disaster for each scene, and, in one case, “key dialog,” which they expected to take at least one page of outline for every 10,000 words of the finished book … meaning that your average 100,000-word novel would require 100 pages of outlining).
Now, I have to admit that working from a 130-page script was easier in a lot of ways than what I usually do, but that’s because I didn’t write the script. I didn’t have to make up the characters, the plot, or the action. (Except for that one scene where the script covered the entire four-minute battle with the single line – I kid you not – “The Jedi fight.”)
Obviously, that writer’s methodology works for them. I have never been able to articulate the main character’s goals or needs for the overall novel, any more than I can say what the theme of my writing is until I finish it and somebody else tells me what it is. The idea that my protagonist has to have a goal for every scene, which I have to decide in advance, and which must end in a disaster is … not just totally foreign to me, but positively antithetical to the way I work.
That said, experience indicates that there are things I usually need to know before I can get started and keep going. But for me, most of that is backstory and setting. Those are the things my characters are stuck with – their past is over and done with, and while they can pull unexpected revelations and reactions (what everybody else thought happened is wrong!) out of the air in mid-book, they can’t actually change what really happened. The more I know about that, the more confident I feel about going forward. It’s having a solid foundation to stand on.
The other problem with these rigid planning methods is that they expect me to be able to forecast my word count, on both a macro and a micro level. That is, they expect me to know both that I am writing an 80,000 word novel and that the scene where Kayla investigates the dungeon will take 1000 words. (It took a chapter and a half, which is four or five times that). I have never been able to do either one with any accuracy.
I do outlines, and I used to try to break them up into chapters, but I gave up when, for the third book in a row, the outline was right about what happened, but the bit I expected to finish in 500 to 800 words took two chapters, while the other bit I expected to take a full chapter took about one page.
I suspect that a lot of these “requirements” have their origins in writing for visual media. TV and movies have some fairly strict requirements for timing, which translate pretty directly into the teaser-plus-four-acts structure to make sure the audience comes back after the commercial break. Also, it’s a lot easier to give writers a recipe – so many words to introduce characters, then a challenge or disruption, so many more words to get to the Act I ending plot twist – than it is to convince them that “there are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right.”
These systems do seem systematic to the point of strangulation. I mean, if they work, great, but I’m with our hostess here.
I will say that, once I worked out how much planning I’d better do before writing a novel – how much and what kind – writing one became a whole lot smoother. Not really easier, not really faster, but less stopping to do the planning that I needed to have already done.
I do know how/where my WIP will end. I could probably write the ending now, but first I have to get through a battle… which isn’t resolved to anybody’s satisfaction so there has to be another … that ending has been two chapters away for the last four chapters at least. /grumble
I need to get my outline down to a scene by scene level. But no goal/disaster.
The more I write, the more I move from pantser to plotter. Some of those systems really seem excessive, though! I’m still looking for my balance point on this, and at this point I wonder if I’ll ever find it.
I cannot possibly know a character’s motivation and reactions to a given situation until I have spent some time with them. And that means writing some scenes—which may or may not end up in the book. And these scenes are never at the beginning—more likely chapter four or seven or ten.
I don’t create characters so much as channel them; they seem to spring fully formed from the brow of Zeus. It is my job as the writer to get to know them, and it is their job to form the events and arc of the storyline—and to let me know when I’m trying to get them to do something that isn’t quite right.
And people expect me to chart all this out in advance? I laugh, I say!
I wish my characters would spring fully formed from *somebody’s* brain. I started out with a tight-third viewpoint character with no personality worth mentioning (in his defense, he’s only fifteen), but as the story went on he filled out and developed and by now (still a few chapters from the end) he is leading a (small) fighting unit and his very senior officer is letting him do it.
I do NOT recommend this as a means of character development; I’m only grateful that it managed to happen this time.
I like to do my world building in detail first. Actually, I usually have to do it. I get brain freeze and can’t think of anything until I know a fair bit about where the events of my story will take place.
Then I do some skeletal planning for the plot of my story, but not too much. Just enough. My back brain tells me when.
Then I think about my protagonist and his or her family and friends. Some.
And then I dive in.
Of course, every project has its own quirks. I remember I started one novel with a vivid scene and nothing else. A recent short story began with a concept, a character, and one event that would form the climax—and nothing else.
But usually the setting is my foundation.
All the detailed outlining methods make me feel like I’m breaking out in mental hives when I think about using them! 😉
A friend who’s done some radio work tells me that the reason for precise script templates (font, size, margins, ways of expressing SFX, etc.) is not particularly for the actors’ convenience but so that they can be locked down with fair reliability at one minute per page. Then the producers can say “a 15-page script using our template” rather than “a 15-minute script”.
I’m still trying to figure out what the optimum amount of advanced planning is for me. I know that too little advanced planning causes me problems, and that attempting too much advanced planning also causes me problems.
Then there’s the way I tend to do a lot of planning at intervals in the middle of writing the first draft. (“Midwriting.”) Some of it is broad-strokes on the multiple-chapter level, some of it is fine choreography of actions within a scene, and much is in-between.
On top of that there’s the need to work out credible timing and timelines: Is the Big Test tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Does it come before or after the Widget Catching Fire incident of the other subplot? And what is a reasonable amount of time to lapse between taking the Big Test and getting the results back?