Young Writers Society

Planning is a hotly-contested subject during the #NaNo season, especially during PlanMo. In fact, the official NaNoWriMo community has designations for "planners", who plan their entire story before November, "pantsers", who plan nothing at all, and "plantsers", who are a mix of both.

There are also a number of methods on the internet for planning: The Snowflake Method is a very popular one that emphasizes taking smaller, more condensed ideas and expanding them into the story you want to see on the page. If you follow it to the end, it even has you write a sort of proto-first-draft to follow when writing your actual draft!

There are other methods to plan, of course—for example, following the Hero's Journey as a rough template for your story (especially if it's a classic adventure), or following other story styles such as the Bildungsroman (coming-of-age story).

There are templates such as Beat Sheets as well that help you conceptualize your story before you begin writing.

What about you? Are you a planner, a pantser, or somewhere in-between?

I'm like...both a planner and a plantser? In-between the two, I guess. When writing a story, I love to spend a lot of time thinking about/fleshing out the outline, major characters, overarching plot, and key settings. On the other hand, templates and outlines don't appeal to me. It's nice to be able to come up with and arrange a lot of specific traits for my characters in a convenient format, but I'm going to forget most of them and change my mind on the rest. In other words, I do most of the general stuff (and even some of the research, if I'm not being lazy) in advance, but I wing most of the specific stuff.

Like @TheSilverFox, I consider myself both. For me, this is how outlining works: I throw a bunch of notes into a word processor and try to shape them into a semi-coherent outline. And then, now that I know how my story will begin and end, and some idea of what happens in the middle, I start writing.

For my characters, I don't really fill out templates. Often, the characters I dream up of in the beginning are quite different when I actually write their story down. So there's honestly no point for my muse to outline them. Same for my worldbuilding. I wing it in that case, because first drafts are where I can explore and try strange story experiments out (like writing from the perspective from a ghost-ified character).

The way it usually goes for me is I get some kind of idea spark, then I wait for the characters to come to me. Once I have my characters and the general premise of the story (like girl catfishes someone in marching band during marching band season), I mull that over for a very long time. Usually months. I do no formal planning, I don't outline, I don't make character sketches, I mull and I let ideas naturally come to me. I try things out in my brain - would character x do y? - and see how that feels until I get a sense of what my characters want, a better sense of the premise, and what the general plot arc is going to be.

I start writing when I know where I'm starting and I have a rough sense of the story beats and I have a rough sense of where we're going to end. Key word is rough (I actually have no idea).

My first drafts are very much about discovery and seeing how things unfold, who my characters are, and exactly what is going to happen. In subsequent drafts I do a lot more outlining and formal planning before I start writing, usually by thinking about story beats.