A place for Stupid Questions

Once again thank you to all of you for giving your thoughts on this. I feel immediately guilty as I have close to no experience and not much to offer by way of my own conclusions.

I agree with those of you who say that the shape of your various elements (character arcs, plot lines etc.) needs revision between drafts, and it reminds me that the…[Read more]

I think most writers are also great readers and have acquired an instinctive grasp of story structure. That doesn’t mean a bit of conscious knowledge won’t help. But sometimes you have to trust your unconscious.

I’m another one whose eyes glaze over at charts, grids, questionnaires and all the rest of it, and find the idea of forcing a story into a set framework very inhibiting. I’d come to suspect that lack of a coherent framework in my writing was one reason I’ve never got on the road to publication, but when I applied the 7 Cs to my last effort it…[Read more]

Ooh what an interesting conversation!

I think it’s quite hard (impossible for me) to tailor a novel according to a detailed framework and I will often start with only the inciting incident, the external problem the MC has to fight/solve and the antagonist forces, whether they’re people or circumstances, then let the story develop a first draft…[Read more]

Thanks Sea – not heard of the ‘7 Cs’ but it makes perfect sense. Perhaps it is that it can’t be immediately applied from the start, i.e. you (meaning one, and definitely I) have to write quite a lot of scenes involving character and events before the story line appears, after which tweaking into shape can take place.

I’m relieved to hear I’m not the only one to have been unable to find a theoretical how-to-plot scheme that works for them, and I really have tried because plotting is certainly what I find hardest, not being a natura story-teller.
Screenwriter Jeremy Sheldon did a brilliant presentation at a Festival of Writing weekend, (2014?) and I’ve been…[Read more]

I always sit in on these ‘story arc’ kinds of sessions in the hope I’ll find one that works for me. I never have…

I do have two that help remind me of the essentials though.

The triangle…I learnt it on the self edit course (now run by Jericho Writers) and blogged about it here:…[Read more]

Thank ‘insert deity here’ you have wrestled with the same issues I’m facing. It’s wonderful to feel that others have toyed with the various types of writing and that I can see some of my own struggles being described in almost the same way I view them.

I love the ‘plantsing’ because it goes some way to alleviate my fears that I’m caught between…[Read more]

In every case I have started with a main character, a beginning, and end and a rough idea of how to get to the end.

However, my characters have a way of bossing me around.

In one novel the guy gets the girl, but as I wrote it became clear that the girl was wrong for him and I then had to write a sequel getting him out of that fix (eventually the…[Read more]

The starting point for every book has been different for me and my process has changed as well. I used to plan very little but now I do try and start with the main thrust of the plot clear in my head otherwise I risk wandering too far down interesting paths that lead nowhere. But I need the actual process of writing words and sentences to…[Read more]

I start with a name – a character who rattles a stick along the boundaries of my subconscious. Someone who, when I am not looking, will sneak through a gap in the railings and broadcast snippets of conversation to pique my interest. If this character stalks me when I am waling the dog, or when I’m driving, then I might allow him/her free-write…[Read more]

I start with the basic premise and the characters, and let the plot unfold as I go. I once learned at a writers’ conference that it makes a lot more sense to outline the whole thing in advance, and I agree with that, but it’s never worked that way for me. I can’t nail the thing down, it wants to take off in another direction once I’m writing it.…[Read more]

I normally have a character and and end in sight when I start. Apart from that, I don’t do much planning at all – my brain simply doesn’t work like that. I’d love to be more organised, but personally it’s stifling. I am full of admiration for peeps who do the whole character file/in depth plot/post-it scene arrangements etc!

I do a lot of…[Read more]