I’m going to start with a bold claim: everyone plots a little bit. It doesn’t have to be written down, but there has to be something before you start, doesn’t there? I’m certain someone out there will tell me I’m wrong, that they just sit down, and the story flows from them onto the page, but I can’t believe that there’s not some kind of subconscious thought that is working its way onto the page.
“everyone plots a little bit.”
Even if your starting point is a ‘what if’ scenario, and you write from there it still has something to give you direction.
- What if God fell from the sky, and landed, dead, in the centre of a market town?
- What if the council lets those potholes get too big, and eldritch terrors escape from the centre of the planet?
- What if alchemy worked?
Sometimes that’s all that’s needed to get started. You can write from that point and explore the consequences and see where it goes. It’s an approach I’ve used for short stories. More often than not, though, a little more planning needs to happen before you can launch into the writing. Yes, you’ve got a plot point, but who is affected by this? Why is it significant for them? Without thinking about your protagonist, you might be letting a good premise fall flat.
The simplest way to get to grips with a character is to consider what their primary motive is. If you have a character who doesn’t want or need anything, where’s the drive to do anything? When a story has a great concept, but then falls flat, it’s often because the events don’t directly affect the character’s own desires. Often, the plot event leads to the character’s design. A global disaster leads to a character’s desperate desire to reunite with family.
I’d say this is the minimum you need before you can start. Others might argue that you could start with an interesting character alone, and go from there. But the second they start to do something, you have an element of plot.
Do you need to know where it’s going at this point? Probably not. You can keep writing and see what happens. This will be easier if you consider some of the basic elements of plot. If you have a character who wants something, then you make their journey interesting by throwing barriers in the way. You can keep throwing problems their way until they eventually reach their goal. I’ve never written that way, but it’s going to work for a lot of people. The only reason I haven’t done so is because most of my work, I’ve had an ending in my head when I’ve started. With Is She Dead in Your Dreams? I had the start and the end. I worked out the rest as I was writing it. With Dead Branches I had a significant event which I thought was the end, but when I was writing it, I found there was a whole part that came after it. What can happen, is that sometimes you go off in the wrong direction, or a lot of work is needed in the edit to ground the events that happen later in the first part – but that’s half the fun of editing, right?
Normal is the only novel I’ve written where I started without an endpoint in mind. I got about a quarter of the way through, and stalled badly. Then I flipped an event, and the rest of the novel fell into place. (Instead of having another character disappear, I switched it so another character returned).
Another aspect that some like to plan out is the way in which the story will be written. It will be first person, present tense, or third person past tense, or second person future tense – you get the idea. I’ve not thought about this too much. I tend to start with what feels right. Sometimes this has needed changing pretty early on to fix it. With this, I think with time you get a better feel about the best way to tell this particular story. It’s good to mix it up a little though and try a different way. It might be how a particular voice breaks through.
The way you tell a story can also affect the degree to which you need to plan. Because Normal had 4 point-of-view characters, each doing their own things which contribute to the whole, I had to consider who had to tell the next part all of the time, and as such, even while I didn’t have a definite end point in mind, I often had the next 10 or so chapters in my head, albeit each only had a sentence summary.
The longer I have been writing, the more I have found that I like to plan, even short stories. Part of this is because the most recent work, the Guy Fawkes: Demon Hunter trilogy needed an overall structure in place before I could begin. Events in book three needed some foundation in book one. Even worse, that one was wedded to real history, so certain things had to happen at certain times, so much of the structure and shape had to fit to this. Without a solid plan, it most certainly would have come unstuck.
In future, I plan to plan, but not to the extent where I can’t let characters and events surprise me. The next major novel project I already have a rough idea in my head and a few of the major characters are starting to feel more real. Before I write, I’ll commit an outline to paper. It doesn’t mean I have to stick to it. I’ll put a page of information together for each of the characters. It doesn’t mean they can’t evolve. Why am I doing this? I guess it’s because I don’t have time to sit down and write this story now. My brain is already working on it, though. I don’t want to lose all of this work, so, when the time comes, I’ll jot it all down.
Maybe if I had the time when the idea first came to me I would have written it right away. Maybe that’s why I’m planning more now: I’ve got more stories being worked through in my head than I have time to write?
So, is one method better than another? Not at all. But don’t stick to doing it one way because that’s what you think is right. Each story might need a different process, so go with whatever helps you get that story onto the page.