LM requested a post on “speeding up a novel planning process re: structure, etc.” This one is probably going to be another series, because I have a lot to chew on here, including backwards planning and gardening/explorer planning vs. the more commonly advised three-act-structure planning.
First off, the three-act-structure planning is not for everybody. I don’t know any writers who plan this way. It can be useful after the book is finished, to catch issues that got missed, but it’s not really about planning. So don’t worry if it doesn’t work for you as a planning tool.
Given your description of your development process—and that’s what you’re talking about here, developing a story-seed into a full-blown idea and/or plot that’s ready to write—I’m recommending some writing books. The first two are highly recommended for everybody: Madison Smartt Bell’s Narrative Design and Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World.
Narrative Design is written in three parts: a brief overview, a section on linear stories, and a section on modular stories. Most of the chapters consist of a story, followed by a point-by-point general analysis of the story parts, followed by a really detailed set of notes on why certain lines and choices worked. You can either read it straight through, or skip around looking for stories that are similar to what you write. For LM, I’d suggest reading the Part I overview, then skipping to Part III on modular design (i.e., non-linear structures). You can go back to Part II on linear design if you feel interested.
Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World looks at approaches to storytelling that differ from the specific plot and structure rules that workshops have made standard in Western (especially American) fiction. Many other cultures look at plot, structure, characters, etc. very differently. This isn’t really a how-to-write book, though it has some workshop exercises in the appendix.
Ray Bradbury’s The Zen of Writing and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones are two writing advice books that seem to speak to people who don’t write analytically. They provide a different approach from the standard plot-and-plan how-to books, even if all they do for you is to remind you that there are a lot of good writers out there who don’t start (or end) with analysis.
What all of these books have in common is that they address ways that a writer can work that don’t fall under the rather rigid structural approaches currently being promoted. I’m hoping they’ll give you some alternatives and a sense that you can make up your own system if nobody else’s works well for you.
As I said earlier, what LM calls “planning” sounds to me like story growth and development. All stories start from some sort of seed: an idea (what if the moon exploded?), a character, a setting, a plot, a theme, an opening line, a closing line, etc. That seed needs to grow before it is ready to produce story-fruit. For some writers, the growth process is fast, methodical, and/or deliberate; for others it takes place mostly under the surface, over geologic time periods. However it goes, the first things the story-seed grows are usually related to the type of story-seed—an idea-based seed will sprout more ideas, a character-based seed will sprout more characters and/or their life stories, and so on.
This is normal. Trying to force a story-seed to grow in a different direction is like trying to make a just-sprouted pumpkin vine immediately produce rose flowers.
The most useful thing the writer can do at this stage is to collect whatever ideas are sprouting (whether they’re new characters, world history, possible spin-off ideas, scenelets, scraps of dialog, or whatever). Over time, writers figure out what sorts of things stimulate them to develop more bits of stories. Some writers I know go on long walks in whatever woods or parks are nearby. Some clean house. Some make Pinterest boards. Some research obsessively, at libraries or on the internet. Some watch anime or old movies. Some visit art galleries.
Sooner or later, the initial one-note collection of story-stuff starts implying other kinds of story-stuff. Information about characters usually implies a lot about the world they live in (setting). History, culture, and politics can imply people, places, plots, and themes. Themes, depending on how they are phrased, can imply setting, people, and plot twists. Everything is connected; it’s a matter of learning to see the connections and pursue them.
The last thing that happens in story development is usually whatever the writer finds trickiest. For me, that’s usually theme (I never know the theme of a book until months after it is finished, usually when someone points it out to me). And yes, that means that “story development” continues throughout the process of writing and rewriting. It’s not the tidy “do it all ahead of time and then start the manuscript” business that so many how-to-write books present it as.
This means that LM needs to figure out the general point at which enough story-stuff has accumulated to start writing. This happens with experience. Also, as time goes on, one has more and more ideas sitting in the background accumulating story-stuff, which means that after a while the pipeline is full and one doesn’t have to wait so long for something to be ready to write. I realize that this is not much comfort to those who are at the beginning of their careers.
Next week, I’m going to take a crack at reverse plotting, i.e., starting by knowing the climax and working backwards. It may end up as two parts… And at some point, I’ll probably want to come back at story development before the planning stage.
Somehow I’m unsurprised to hear there probably isn’t a good way to speed up the part of getting a storyworld and set of characters to what I call critical mass, the stage wherein we introduce plotting. I suppose on the bright side, that is in fact the easiest part of the process, even if most of the projects there or near it started years back.
I do a lot of snippeting inspired by music and collect it in notebooks I’m terrible at typing up promptly. Organizing the massive fodder file, which incl. stuff I wrote in childhood even, is uh… thus far a needed but absolutely unfinished project.
I shall go collect those books and read them! Ever since end of 2022, I’ve been basically rebuilding my writing process, since my old one only produced short stories and the backlog of unfinished novels was getting to me. It has been harder than expected to track down relevant craft books, though I’ve kinda tried them all, not just the rare ones that seem aimed towards my kind of needs.
Thank you so much!
Take notes. That will ensure that critical mass is not lost. (You are right that typing up may help preserve the results, though getting it down helps fix it in memory.)
Throw ideas together. Run a dating service for your plot bunnies.
Not that this is exactly an algorithm
Snippets work better than notes, except for meta things, like the fantasy calendar I’m spreadsheeting today from my notebooks. But yeah, critical mass is never lost or it wouldn’t be a critical “mass” of material sufficient to carve off a book from.
Plot bunnies don’t happen for me, thus the question. Story does. World and characters build up to critical mass in the form of snippets, etc. then once a climactic character moment is selected for plotting toward, then we have the unfun of plotting.
I’m seriously looking forward to the next post in the series.
Despite the name, plot bunnies are not all plot ideas. It would be easier if they were.
I suspect we use vastly different terms because we also have vastly different processes. I’m glad yours works well for you, and I generally recognize all the things you’re saying from other outlining writers’ descriptions and things I’ve tried and discarded as not for me. I’m not trying to be overly literal in my replies but simply to clarify.
I write world and characters until a critical mass of written material clearly belongs to one story. Then I must extract a plot from the material necessary to setup my chosen payoff/climax. I don’t have any issue with getting to critical mass other than time in the oven, which I’d love to reduce, but alas. Plotting is a pain and outlines don’t work for me. Everything about how I write is out of order and simply extrapolates in all directions. Putting things in sequence is 100% either insert somewhere that feels right as I go, or arrange into position at the end.
I suspect the post on reverse plotting will be super helpful. I appreciate you offering advice.
I decided to write a short story as a mock NaNoWriMo, since one had dropped into my head almost fully formed.
Finished it last night. Fun experience and I’m kind of pleased, except:
(1) It’s not a short story; it’s 18K words and might grow some more on revision.
(2) While it has an ending that could stand as such, as of this morning I know what the next part would be. It’s cool! But someday I actually want to write a short story….
I absolutely love it when the writing flows nicely, even if the result isn’t what I expected.
I do not use the three-act structure to outline.
I use — when I use it — the Beat Sheet from Save the Cat.
There are a number of such structures out there. You need to choose one that works for you.
And I don’t always use it. My chief use is when I start to pull the plot together and realize I have a Big Ending Scene and a Big Inciting Incident and have to plot a Big Midpoint Scene and figure out what gets slotted before and after it. (In particular, it does not play well with a big epic story.)
Normally I just outline a series of scenes. If they have enough turning points to keep the middle of the story dramatic, it works. (And putting “stuff goes here” helps me keep story events in temporal order when they obviously can’t be sequential. The hero and heroine aren’t going to meet and dramatically sacrifice for each other in the next scene.)
My own method–so far as I’ve discovered it, anyhow–is not nearly so structured or organized. I rarely know what any of the Big Scenes are before I start (except maybe one or two tidbits in the middle that sound like fun to write until I reach them), and I write sequentially because my brain needs to have the foundation of Stuff That Goes Before to build upon.
The result is that, while I know that my current WIP is a retelling of “The Little Mermaid,” I don’t yet know how any of the stuff I’m setting up right now is going to be resolved, and three quarters of the stuff I’m setting up is coming straight from my brain with no planning whatsoever. I basically am hitting each new scene and going, ‘Something needs to happen here,’ then inventing the something and sticking it in and hoping it’ll connect with everything else later. (I’m also doing some weird stuff with languages and worldbuilding, and as a result the MC’s interactions with human society are *really* hard to write because the way her brain works breaks my own.)
My previous WIP was much the same on the initial draft, but then the three drafts after it grew more and more organized as time went on, and the story itself grew less overtly chaotic and disconnected. I’m hoping this fairy-tale retelling will be easier to look at and revise as a whole during the rewrites, but I have to slog through the first draft before I can have any rewrites. At least the romance element in this story is looking to be a lot of fun, even if everything else is being a pain.
Yeah, well, my plot bunnies kept running away mid-story. This is my crafty means of forcing them to either show me the ending or admit they don’t have one.
Good luck, then! I’ll be interested to know if it works. 🙂
Well, it works for me. Published novels and everything.
I especially like the point about recognizing “the general point at which enough story-stuff has accumulated to start writing.” My accumulating notes for a story include all sorts of stuff — plot outline, characters, themes, worldbuilding — but there is that watershed moment when I actually have to start the writing.
Generally I think that moment comes when I have enough of the plotline in mind (with plenty of “stuff goes here” steps, as Mary puts it, to be developed later) that I know at least what the opening scene should be — with enough of the later plot laid out that I won’t (I hope) have to spend a lot of time doubling back to realign opening sequences with the stuff that develops later. That way I never have that experience of facing a blank screen with no idea what to say: there’s always an outline that sketches some semblance of what the next scene will be.