Hi folks,

Hoping someone can give me some pointers!

How much of your novel do you plan in advance? It’s something I struggle with so I wanted to see what you thought the best technique was.

I am trying a more structured approach, but I am worried because sometimes I go off on a tangent and it messes up my plan, and often I don’t want to delete what I wrote as I think it works better than what I had originally in mind.

The issue is that then I sometimes struggle to bring the story back to my original point, and it seems forced.

Is it a case that I simply need to be more disciplined and stick to my plan, or should I “go with the flow” as it were and see where it takes me?

As a bit of background, I used to be a big fan of having a very loose plan, start writing and then see what happened. I liked the excitement of not knowing where my characters were going to end up. After a certain point I found this approach problematic as I struggled to make my ending convincing or move the plot forward, since I didn’t really have an ending in mind (apart from perhaps a very loose idea of what I wanted) and this made the whole process feel somewhat dissatisfying.

I don’t like planning too much as I find it restrictive, but maybe it’s simply something I need to get on with. I don’t enjoy it as much though.

Help!

Stephanie

Hi Steph

Is it a case that I simply need to be more disciplined and stick to my plan, or should I “go with the flow” as it were and see where it takes me?

Generally speaking, I'd always suggest going with the flow, when you're writing a "zero draft" - having your first stab a finding out how this story works - because it's an indication that the story and characters are coming alive to you, and beginning to have their own coherence and forward movement... and you ignore that at your peril.

Having said that, the big risk is that you end up with a story which wanders around, doesn't have enough forward movement, is full of unfinished business, surplus stuff, bits that go nowhere, where the structure sags... it can be really hard to sort out a novel that has those kinds of big, structural flaws. And what's more, now so much about the characters/themes - the whole, imaginary world - gets established and settled for you, as THE reality of this novel, it can be very difficult to see where, actually, you're going to have to do something pretty drastic. Like re-write the whole novel from scratch from the other point of view, say... Plus, often the prose is woolly, when you're feeling your way: if you don't really know what you're trying to say, yet, then you won't be writing it really well.

It's worth remembering that planning and writing the first draft are only two different kinds of imagining-out-onto-paper.

There's nothing about a plan which is holding a gun to your head - any more than a plan to spend a morning in paris at the Louvre, only to find it's shut, means you have to start jemmying open the door, rather than change plans and go to Sacre Coeur instead.

But, equally, there's nothing sacred about writing a first draft (which is, of course, really the first try at a final draft), rather than working out your story in other imaginative processes, which means that this is the "real" writing that you have to believe.

So, FWIW, what I do is to plan, but plan in pencil - mentally and physically. Yes, I know where I'm going, in the broadest sense. I know, shall we say, that my two protagonists, who start out as business enemies, are going to trying to decide whether to get married at the end. But there are a million routes from the beginning to that end...

Think of that end as the mountain top you're going to hike to, and the beginning as the car park at the bottom of the mountain. There are three exits from the carpark that all say "To The Summit", and the country in between is seamed with paths: short cuts and scenic routes, gentle ascents and stiff climbs, dead ends and cliff edges... but you can't really see them, and you don't have much of a map.

What I do is work out in some detail what the most promise car-park exit is - how my protagonists first encounter one another - and do my best to see a few of the turns ahead, and decide what to do about them, to make sure I don't just end up back in the car park again, or, indeed, on the rack-railway straight to the wedding scene at top only few thousand words later.

The paths further ahead of me are much vaguer, but I do know where I want to end up, and I have the broad shapes and heights and compass points in my head... and always, there's the peak, up ahead. And each choice I have to make, as I write my way forward, is guided by my sense of those larger things. (This analogy is going to fall apart in a minute!)

Sometimes I'll get to a choice I'd forseen, but it turns out that the path I thought I wanted looks wrong - I thought my protagonists would both accompany the accountant to hospital, but actually one of them is allergic to hospitals because I carefully gave her a nice, traumatic backstory concerning a medical accident... Well, okay - I'll go the other way.

However - I then need to re-think things a bit. How will I cope with the fact that this new path seems to curl round the side of the mountain? I pause, consult my bigger sense of the mountain (compass, altitude meter, knowledge of geology Google Earth on my phone), and decide whether it's likely to work or not.

Alternatively, if it's NOT likely to work (because the reader will hate my heroine forever if she doesn't do the decent thing and go to hospital) how do I change things now, or in the backstory, to make her going to hospital convincing?

One last thing - I frequently don't know whether they do, actually, get married or not at the end, until I've written my way to that point. In that sense, I don't know the ending. But I do know that the final crisis will be the decision, and everything about the journey to that point is about building to that crisis...

These two posts, about the relationship of imagining to writing, might help:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2011/12/dreaming-the-map-the-efficiency-of-magic.html

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2009/01/building-the-bridge.html

I usually start with a compelling scene or idea that intrigues me. Such as a girl who realises she's being followed, but has no idea why. Or the idea of someone pretending to be a missing child. Then I'll just starting asking myself questions like why? Who is this person? What's happening? Then a few answers will float up. And more questions arise. Like Emma says, this is called planning, but it's more writing but without using lots of words yet. Though sometimes whole interactions or snatches of dialogue will pop up and end up pretty much unadulterated in the final thing.

I think of plotting as just doing this, adding layer upon layer, until I'm ready to do some character outlines, which often then suggest more plot points. In the end I feel I'm in a position to start thinking about what will happen chapter by chapter, then I'm ready to start the first draft.

But though I think of myself as a plotter, this is a pretty fluid process. Often things come up as I'm doing that first draft, and I'll go back and layer in a whole new section of story, or decide I need to add in several more chapters somewhere to make the pace feel right. I don't feel I have to stick rigidly to my chapter outline at all.




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Also, I don't start by writing the chapters in sequence. I'll often start with the scenes that have the strongest emotional resonance, or that I can imagine most easily. Then progress to filling the gaps around them. It's not a linear, start-at-the-beginning-and-work-through-to-the-end thing at all.

I was also going to say that you will find your own method and best way of working by trial and error. The most terrifying thing for me when I started fiction was not knowing the 'right' way to go about it. I didn't realise there wasn't a right way. But now I've found 'my' way, I find the whole process much quicker, as well as more manageable and enjoyable.

I start with the idea, then rough out a plan plus chronology and details about the characters which I will need and which it will bug me to keep forgetting (which I will do).

I have a rough outline of each chapter, and as the novel progresses, I amend these. For example, I might have thought the chapter would finish with scene A fully completed, but in the actual writing of it, I realise that it needs to break over two chapters to do it justice. So I shift things about a bit, maybe compress some of what was going to be in the next chapter, depending on where the writing takes me.

But I always have a road map of where I want the characters to be at any given point - it's just the way they get there that might end up differently to what I'd originally planned.

Hope this helps.

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply

This has been very helpful, thanks. The main points that will help me are:

- Coming up with the outline of the story is part of the first draft, so I shouldn’t really stress too much if it turns out I need to change some (or several) major elements;
- Keep in mind the bigger picture;
- Don’t stress over structure. I’m allowed to write parts of a scene as and when they come to me, it’s not a case that I must complete chapters in order;
- Have a road map.

Honestly, thank you so much everyone. You put this so eloquently for me.

I had another question if you don’t mind?

The ending. With this particular story, I know where the major characters are going to end up (in terms of actual character development) and I have a good idea of how I want the actual plot to end (which again ties in with the characters’ development as individuals).

Should I spend more time coming up with a strong conclusion to my novel though?

Is that “the done thing”? I know of authors who don’t really come up with an ending until they get there, and you can often tell (a lot of Stephen King novels, for example).

Or should I rely of my amazing creative juices to come up with an ending that will organically fit in with all the plot changes I will make along the way?

I really struggle with this one.

Thanks,

Stephanie

I know where the major characters are going to end up (in terms of actual character development) and I have a good idea of how I want the actual plot to end (which again ties in with the characters’ development as individuals).

That sounds to me as if you've got all the materials you need.

Should I spend more time coming up with a strong conclusion to my novel though?

As in, deciding the exact events that make that conclusion, do you mean?

I think it depends... I would always know what the final climactic crisis would be, but where, say, it happened, or how they arrived there, I would probably not know until I was in perhaps the last third of the novel, where things are coming together - settings, plot, who else is there, etc..

Certainly as I wrote I'd keep my mental ears pricked for any bright ideas about what should happen, and make a note. But I wouldn't necessarily know the details until I got there.

But I do write my novels absolutely ruthlessly in the order they're read in. I'm fascinated and slightly awed by those of us who write out-of-order, because I can't imagine being able to do so.

Thinking about the endings of my novels (and though I've re-written just about every other aspect of most of my novels, I've almost never had to re-think the beginning, or the end of a novel), I think the crucial thing is that the character-developments (and therefore the plot) of the main people interact, and affect each other... so that hopefully as you get closer to the end it becomes obvious how what you could call the emotional/affective story is going to come to a climax... and that being so then the practical business of where and when it should happen should become obvious.

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Or, in reverse, if you know where the climax will happen practically - place, action - and you have a clear idea of what the main characters' relationships are by the time you're getting towards that climax, I think it will become clear just how the action of the last scenes will give rise to the emotional resolution...

Thanks again for your advice Emma

I think part of the problem is that I am not confident the characters’ development is convincing enough. I’ll work on that a bit more, but I think I know a bit better what I should do.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the thread!

Steph

You're welcome, Steph.