This is the planning part of writing that I love–and, coincidentally, I’m doing right now in preparation to write Book III as a NaNoWriMo book. When I visited Nanowrimo’s official website to sign up, I found the image above in the Nano prep, along with the question, what kind of writer am I?
I had to laugh, because I am in the “there is no spoon” camp. I don’t believe that planners or pantsers exist as we imagine them. I rant extensively on this subject in my guest post about summary on Dogpatch, so I won’t repeat the rant here, I’ll just summarize: a long tormentous path on my writing journey was overcoming the myth of being a panster or a planner and realizing that all writers do some of both. The main difference is that writers who tend to pants, plan after they pants (or draft as I like to call it), and writers who tend to plan, plan before they pants (draft). In my experience, writing is a back and forth tension between the two, getting as far as you can with planning, then drafting what you need to to reveal the finer details of the story, then revising the plan, drafting more, re-planning, drafting, re-planning.
To avoid confusing matters, I’m going to try to talk about the stages of planning without a chronological landmark, i.e. before or after drafting. Obviously, this might get confusing anyway. Well, no one ever said that writing was easy.
The fuel of planning is brainstorming. (I say fuel rather than first step to unhook this stage from chronology. You might brainstorm at any stage in the writing process.)
Brainstorming is basically moving ideas from your subconscious to your conscious mind, taking them off the shelf and out of the shadows, holding them under the light, examining them, discarding them or placing them in the story. There are many different ways to do this.
I often do it with no physical record at all. When I was still working at the toy store, I would walk to work every morning and brainstorm for the entire half hour. Some of my best ideas ever would occur within a block from my house, to the point where when I walk by a certain tree or house today, I think about my characters.
There are other ways to do this–sitting or laying comfortably, working out, doing the dishes, anything that doesn’t require 100% of your mental focus. I prime the pump by asking a question about my story of conjuring a specific question or dilemma, or on occasion I start by trying to visualize the scene in question in detail.
Once I start thinking about it, my brain storms away considering solutions. I think in a very cause-effect manner, “if that were to happen then this would need to happen and that would cause this to happen . . .” At some point in here, a resolution or epiphany presents itself, and that is the idea generated by the brainstorm.
It’s probably a good idea to write down said epiphany immediately. I usually wait up to a day; I tend to find that if the idea was good, it will resonate so strongly that I won’t forget right away. And that’s important, because the ideas should be so strong and resonant as to make the reader not want to put down the book. If you’re likely to forget it within a day, perhaps a reader is likely to gloss over it or not care. On the other hand, this could just be my own particularity, so if you need to write down your epiphanies as they come, don’t let me stop you.
This kind of visualization or free-thinking is just one form of brainstorming, my particular favorite. Some people make clusters, some people make lists, some people freewrite; for some pansters once could argue that drafting itself is a form of brainstorming. Asking questions such as world-building questions or filling out a character questionnaire is a wonderful form of guided brainstorming.
The end result of brainstorming in whatever form it takes will be ideas. Ideas for character traits, ideas for plot events, ideas for your setting, ideas for possible themes, ideas for scenes.
Having a heap of ideas after your brainstorm is kind of like having a heap of beautiful, shiny shoes. Sure, they are gorgeous individually, but without some kind of organization they look rather ugly together.
Enter the framework of planning: the short form.
A short form can be an outline, it can be a paragraph-format summary, it can be a scene list, it can be a story board. For the purpose of remaining vague enough to satisfy all comers, I’m going to keep calling it the short form. Like a good shoe closet, it serves several functions: organization, storage, and space-saver.
Imagine if you took every single one of your gorgeous shiny shoes and tried to wear them all at once. It would be unwieldy, am I right? A short form gives you a place to keep your ideas organized and in order so that you can take them out one at a time and try them on. It’s organized, so you don’t have to dig around in the pile for those ballet flats you knew were there somewhere.
It doesn’t matter at what stage in the writing process you do it (although I am an advocate for planning as much as you can upfront) at some point you have to take your ideas and line them up in an orderly manner. Using a short form will allow you to manipulate the ideas in a manageable format rather than in a huge draft. Even if you’ve already drafted, it pays to create a short form in which to organize the ideas generated by that draft. That way you can make changes to the short form first, test them out, then apply those that pass to the larger draft.
My personal experience and proclivity is to the summary method. If you’re interested in the details of this method, read my original post about it here (this is the same link as above). Outlines and lists don’t really work for me because they don’t convey the causal link of ideas that’s so important to my brainstorming process. Here are some of the short form documents I keep my ideas organized in:
- Plot Summary (this happens, then this happens, then this happens . . .)
- Character Summaries (the basic backstory on each character in paragraph form)
- Setting Summaries (A paragraph form description of each distinct nation or culture in the book)
- Character Arc Summaries (similar to the plot summary, but with the focus on each character’s personal development, story role, and motives at each stage of the story)
- One Sentence summary of each book in a series
- One Paragraph summary of each book in a series
Now, as you may have noticed, there is still a gap between the short form documents I’ve listed and the actual finished product, the book. There’s no document listed here that tells me what scenes I need to write (although the plot summary is roughly in that direction), nothing that says: this is the inciting incident, these are the obstacles to the characters desires, this is the climax, this is the rising tension leading to the climax. While I’ve planned a story, I haven’t planned a book.
As it happens, that particular gap gave me a major headache and caused me to have to do some major re-writes of my draft of Book II. As I plan Book III, I’m trying to figure out the best way to remediate these issues and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Hopefully, I’ll have it figured out by the next time I post in 101 TIWIK #50: Planning: From Story to Book
