How I Cope With My Box of Bugs.

[Terrie]

I might just be burbling on to more practised and organised storytellers but thought I’d share this little part of my writing experiences.

In my teens, when I first began to tinker with the idea that I could be a writer, I simply let whatever came into my head trickle out from beneath my fingers. Sometimes it made sense sometimes it didn’t. The most important thing for me was the enjoyment found in this creative form of expressing myself. It was when I became interested in discovering more about the craft of writing I realised the enormous scope of what I so loved to do.

It’s a fact that some writers say they plan everything carefully and invest what seems a huge amount of time in this stage of their writing while others maintain they just write until they are done. How you plot and plan your writing regime is always down to personal choice. The time, space, and general situation you find yourself in when you set out on each creative journey will also affect how you proceed. Always choose what suits your way of working most effectively.

Personally, I tend to meander along a path between the two ways of working.

I find with most things in life we attempt, smaller tasks can be completed, though it’s not always the case, with little or no forward planning, however, successfully balancing everything in bigger projects of any sort is a different box of bugs. Some things crawl, some things roll or meander and some things fly, not always in a straight line or at a pace you can easily cope with. Stuff invariably hops about in a tangled mess. Writing is no different. For me shorter works, sometimes need only a word limit, or prompt word, and generally larger pieces need more in place to ensure successful completion.

Keeping track of things like character traits/flaws, timeline continuity or what action to include in each chapter always seemed to keep me backtracking re-reading and, in essence, stopping me moving forward with what I was creating. Eventually and after a fair bit of research I worked out if I wanted to complete something larger I needed to come up with something to keep me on track regarding all aspects of continuity as well as what needed to go where and in what order, so I started cherry-picking through a few methods for planning and organising ideas and stories. It was a small step from there to design some simple character outline and backstory sheets, an overall story plan sheet and some chapter-by-chapter mini-story arc sheets that suit my style of working.

It initially feels like extra work when all I want to do is get the story out of my head and into some form of physicality but it definitely helps my focus when weaving the threads of the tale. It’s been invaluable in supporting me directing the narrative forward at an even pace as well.

A bonus for me is, I now notice earlier when a section needs additions, or tweaking in some way, so I quickly type in a few capital Xs and highlight into the spot in yellow. That way I don’t forget to re-visit the section at a later date with fresh perspective.

One thing I do know a writer needs to develop a tenacity and inner strength not merely to create but to have the courage to cut or change that creation to move it forward. This is definitely a challenge for me so when I say cut I don’t mean ‘cut and discard’, I mean ‘cut and store’. I have taken the advice of other writers and always keep pieces like that in a file folder or note book because, you never know, it just might be useful within the framework of a future creation.

[Athelstone]

I’ve written three full length novels and two shorter ones, plus numerous short stories. I’ve never been able to bring any planning tools to bear on the process, either widely advocated or self-invented. Yes, it is extraordinarily difficult and a constant worry as the story progresses, since I am an inveterate seat-of-the-pants writer. Yes, I often have an idea of the arc, and often a view on how things will end, but often that’s the extent of it. I have no doubt at all that this dramatically slows my speed of writing. It isn’t by accident that the most prolific authors I know are all great planners.

[Libby]

I like the bugs analogy, Terrie.

Roughly I do something like this: I plan, though not in great detail – usually the ending and a couple of things along the way. When I start writing the plan doesn’t seem to work so I alter the order of events or cut events. After a bit I give up with the plan and hope the writing will suggest what I need to do with the story. I wouldn’t recommend this method but it’s the best I can manage.

[RichardB]

Stephen King, Ath? He’s said that he never knows what’s going to happen when he starts a novel, and he’s published nearly seventy of them.

Your method (if we can grace it with that name), Ath, sounds very much like mine: a rough idea of the story arc and the ending, and not much more. The nearest I ever got to planning was to write out the rather extensive backstory of one of the characters in my second novel, who had ‘a past.’ If ever I tried to plan properly, my eyes would glaze over.

Mind you, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this approach, considering the reaction, or rather total lack of it, when I submitted either of my completed novels…

[Athelstone]

To be fair, sometimes I don’t know the ending – or the story.

[Seagreen]

I love to plan. That’s why nothing ever gets written.

[Author]

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