To Plan or Not to Plan

Hi everyone,

I’m still here. Today, my writing centered on planning, so that’s what I’m going to talk about in this post.

Whether writers should plan/outline before writing or just write by the seat of their pants (pantsers) is a highly debated topic in the writing world.

My opinion? Plan. Don’t plan. It doesn’t matter. Do whatever works for you. But I’d try both. You never know if one is better for you than the other, unless you try it.

What kind of a writer am I, I hear you ask? A plotter or a pantser?

I started out as a pure pantser. Although, I prefer the term discovery writer. And it worked for me. For a while. But then I hit something I’d avoided. The Dreaded Revisions.

I’d say that for discovery writers, revisions are much harder than for plotters. In discovery writing, you have so much extra, irrelevant stuff and avenues you started to go down, but leaped off when the story took a different direction, that it makes revisions much harder, in my opinion.

My YA novel, Out of Time, the one still in the messy first draft stage, even though I actually wrote it before Destructive Magic and The Search for Magic is a pure discovery written novel. Why is it still in its messy first draft state? Why haven’t I revised it? Well…that’s because it’s beyond messy. Think bad-hair-day-after-you’ve-walked-through-a-tornado messy.

I wrote the entire novel in intense discovery mode. I didn’t write a single line, a single word of outline. In my head, I had the character. A young boy. I knew his journey. He’ll later link with my other Tieralon novels (Destructive Magic and The Search for Magic) but I wanted to write about his childhood before he met all my other characters. I knew he’d been imprisoned and that he was going to find a dragon. That’s it.

So here’s where the story went after that.

He was a prisoner his entire life and he doesn’t know why. He escapes, discovers he has powers that people (his jailers) are afraid of. He rescues a teeny, tiny dragon (I love dragons) and goes on the run.

That’s all simple. Straight forward. An easy story to write in discovery mode. But then I put him on a broken world where time was shattered.

So here’s where it gets messy. I have him jump around time. A lot. I have him telling a love story between two other characters. In non-chronological order. Plus, he faces two enemies. And he grows as character. And messes with Time.

Soooo…revising this is a nightmare. Finding the beats (plot points) is a nightmare. It’s a super interesting story, though. But where is my midpoint? I can’t tell you. I have threads that were interesting at the beginning of the story—enemy number one—that faded in my mind as a new shiny and more interesting enemy appeared—enemy number two. So for twenty percent of the book, I forgot that enemy number one existed, or rather, it bored me too much to write about it. Now I have to go back and read it all and yank out my hair figuring out where my beats are for each plot/subplot and line them up for greatest impact.

Like I said, a nightmare.

I wish, I wish I had outlined it first. The problem is that I didn’t know my story until I’d finished it. I will go back and outline it one day, but I’ll need courage and to be a better writer. It’s too complicated a story for this point in my writing journey.

Because of my trauma attempting to revise Out of Time with its lack of proper beats, I outlined Destructive Magic before writing it. Now by outlining, I mean outlining for a discovery writer. Which means I outlined (mostly) the big 5 beats: Inciting Incident, Midpoint, Crisis and Climax. I did not outline the break into 2 (plot point 1/climax to act 1) but I did do a couple of beats between the crisis (where everything goes to pot) and the climax (where the MC achieves the story goal).

This skeleton outline made revision possible for me.

When outlining The Search for Magic, I had all 5 major beats plotted, but in addition, while writing, I’d outline three or four scenes in advance, then I’d write them. After which I took stock of my story, then planned the next three scenes and so on. This led to a tighter, less messy story. And easier revisions. And makes me a hybrid discovery writer.

But regardless of which kind of first draft writer you are, revisions is a time for outlines and plans.

Oh dear, I got side tracked with the past again.  Back to today. Or mostly. A few days ago, I selected the scenes I wanted in my midpoint from my raw materials. I have a large midpoint sequence. I know it’s long but I’m sticking with it for the moment. I might reduce it in draft three but that’s a long way off. Today, I wrote a plan for two of these scenes. Here’s what my plan covered:

Scene Plan:

Setting:

Atmosphere:

Lighting:

Weather:

Temperature:

Senses: 

MC Goal:

Emotion at the start of the scene:

·      Primary: (obvious emotion)

·      Secondary (the less obvious one under the surface of the primary one)

Obstacles:

1.     Roadblock to MC goal.

2.     Even bigger roadblock to MC Goal.

3.     10X worse than previous roadblock.

4.     Turning Point 1: Crisis: give up or continue.

5.     Ticking clock.

6.     Turning Point 2: Climax: MC achieves or fails to achieve goal.

Emotion at the end of the scene:

·      Primary:

·      Secondary:

As I rewrite the scene over the next few days, I’ll try to explain what I mean by each of the points in my plan. But that’s it for now.

See you tomorrow.

Happy writing,

Joanne.