Paraphrased from a question:
I could *never* work with something as structured as your plotting board. I’m not that logical a person, I guess… Your description of how each scene should touch on several plot points… was so super-organized it freaked me out. I mean, when I write, I just write. I don’t think specifically about ‘does this scene incorporate plot line a, b, & c?’ …Made me feel like an unorganized loser who would never get published b/c I don’t have some magic system for organizing my book before I write. 🙂
Organization works for me because my brain is very analytical and a big fan of structure. I’m pretty sure it comes from my years studying Literature in college. In my classes, not only did I spend a lot of time dissecting narratives in an effort to divine the method by which the author had achieved his (and, much more rarely, HER) end, but I also spent a lot of time writing papers where I had to very carefully map out what arguments I was making and how they were being made. Ever since I turned my focus from literary analysis to literary creation, I’ve been drawn to methods that have the same focus on structure and analysis. I’m a big fan of a lot of screenwriting tips, since they, much moreso than novel-writing, it seems, like to focus on structure. I’ve written before about how much I like the four-act storytelling structure. One of my top five pieces of writing advice is Chekov’s gun (“If there’s a gun on the wall in the first act, it must go off by the third,”) and its logical converse of if you’re gonna have that gun go off in the third act, you’d better have put it on the wall right up front.
Which is a long and rather unfortunately pretentious way of saying that it works for me.
And because I love structure, and because I like playing with structure, I’m super-chuffed when people notice, as in this Romance Divas review: “This is a very smart story. I don’t mean in the sense that it’s written with thirteen syllable words hardly anyone understands, but the story is exceptionally well-structured.”
Woo hoo! Okay, moving on before I get unbearable…
Other people are more organic. I have a very good friend whose book is out next month, Jana De Leon, who says that if she knew “who dunnit” before she wrote, then how could it be suspenseful for the audience? That would drive *me* crazy. But we both publish. I think Nora Roberts makes it up as she goes along, too. You can’t get a much better advocate for flying into the mist than that.
I would never tell anyone how they should write a book. there are as many ways as there are books. I can only talk about how I write a book, and if someone is having a problem, suggesting options that I know have worked for me. The way Jana writes her books scares the crap out of me, but I can’t argue with the results. And when I was first starting out, I tried several different methods to make sure that what I thought was working for me was indeed working. If I tried writing it without planning it out in advance, I stalled pretty quickly.
People who don’t plan stuff out in advance are often called “pantsters” because they are writing by the seat of their pants. (I really hate that term, by the way.) Pantsters have told me that if they plot in advance, they feel like the book has already been written and they can’t get excited about writing it. This doesn’t happen for me at all! While I’m writing, I find myself getting more and more excited about hte groundwork I’m laying for future scenes. And when I finally reach the payoff, the big reveal, the big love scene, the big chase scene, the big climax, I’m so pumped because I’ve been waiting for it to happen for however many pages!
I have no idea what correlation this preference has with personality types. For instance, Jana and I are very similar in a lot of other ways, have a lot of the same approaches to the industry side of the business (this is why we are friends), and I think she is, in general, more analytical than me. Certainly, her day job involves a hell of a lot more math and logic! But we write our stories completely differently. Which is why I can say without any reservation that I don’t think the writing method matters. If you’re having trouble, try something different, by all means. But don’t think that you’re ever a “loser” becuase you approach storytelling differently than another writer.
I find that the plotting board helps me in revision. It especially helped when I was wriitng romance and could color code the scene according to whose POV we were in. I would notice that I’d spend a hundred of pages in one POV and knew I had to go back and switch it up. (In passing, it’s one of the things I really like now about writing in one POV.)
Regarding the “several plot points per scene” — I don’t really think about it when writing the scene, but when I’m plotting, and when I’m revising, I definitely do. In the early stages of my writing career, I spoke to a lot of people who would talk about cutting numerous pointless scenes from their manuscript, which surprised me. I try not to write those scenes to start with. Having plotted the book out in advance, I usually know before writing them that they aren’t going to work. But braiding plot elements came organically to me. I think a lot of writers come to the craft with certain things we natively understand and can do well, and certain things we’ve got to learn from scratch, and a big challenge is understanding that some people are going to be naturally brilliant at something we have a hard time with and vice versa.
Still, I could never write a whole book like that.
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