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Let's talk about plot, baby.



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Wed Aug 13, 2014 5:44 am
thewriterinside says...



Before you write a novel, do you plan it out meticulously? Do you write a summary? Do you use an outline? If you do, what sort of format do you use? I'm sure that there are some really great plot templates out there available to use.

Personally, I prefer to let the plot bunny hop around in my head before I write. I plan the whole thing out in my head.

How do you plan out your novel?
Last edited by thewriterinside on Wed Aug 13, 2014 6:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Wed Aug 13, 2014 5:58 am
windrattlestheblinds says...



it takes me a REALLY long time to get stories to a point where they're ready to be put to words. i call it fermenting because new ideas brew for months (at minimum), more often years before i even start thinking about an outline.

then i write little vignettes and drabbles. a lot of them. hundreds of the things. i have 80k+ words' worth of 100-1000-word stories for my current baby, monachopsis, for example.

that gives me a general feel for the characters and the direction of the story. it also helps me suss out plot holes—if there's a gap in the timeline where i haven't written any little snippets, it's almost certainly because that part of the timeline is broken and needs to be corrected. likewise, places where there's tons of little stories in a short period of time tend to contradict each other as i changed my mind or thought of something better.

in the end, i'll have sort of a scatterplot of material. i'll set it aside for a while, then go back and read over it all and get an idea of how it progresses. then i set it aside again and sketch out an outline by writing a synopsis and then writing out synopses for each chapter until i get to the resolution and end.

then i wait a while (a couple days usually) and come back to it to see if it still looks alright, and then i just start cracking at it. i have a rule that i'm not allowed to copy-paste anything from the existing snippets, because that makes everything super patchy.

monachopsis has actually had one of the fastest writing processes ever. i'm on a third draft and it's been almost exactly two years since i came up with the original idea in the first place.

the exception to this is nanowrimos, which i prefer to just pants and see what happens.
  





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Wed Aug 13, 2014 6:29 am
Blackwood says...



I don't plan. As soon as I get a spark of an idea I just start writing and see where it takes me.
Hahah....haha.....ahahaha.
  





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Wed Aug 13, 2014 6:40 am
beans says...



Outlines, outlines, outlines!

Each character gets an outline, so I know their backstory even if I never mention it in writing. Some things I outline:

Factions

Places

Weapons

Technology

Mythology

Basic lore

Races

Interpersonal connections (how certain characters feel about eachother)

The "episodes" get outlines as well. I mostly just use goofy sentences to convey my thoughts back to myself when I read them later.
  





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Wed Aug 13, 2014 6:55 am
thewriterinside says...



What about characters? Do you guys plan out characters? I've found a couple of cool character fill in the blank sheets for personality and general information and stuff.
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Wed Aug 13, 2014 8:18 am
windrattlestheblinds says...



sometimes i write sketches for minor recurring characters because i don't know them as well. but i never start writing for real before i feel confident that i can answer any possible question about my mains off-the-cuff. character notes, i've found, become both a cheat and a limitation for me.

and a character sketch for a main would be thousands of words long anyway, because i'd feel compelled to go into extreme detail about their motivations and ambitions and stakes and secrets and fears and what they want from everyone in their life and what influence their circumstances have on them and why they believe the things they do and what they are and are not willing to sacrifice to get what they want and what needs they have that aren't being met and on and on and on... so much easier to just keep all that in my head. and if i relied on notes i'd have to commit them to memory anyway, because i can't write in character without knowing the character from the inside out, as well as if not better than i know myself.

i do keep logs of every time i write a physical description, though, for ease of reference and to ensure consistency.
  





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Wed Aug 13, 2014 8:26 am
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thewriterinside says...



Guys! Guys! I know this isn't really relevant, but I just finished part I of my novel!! I'm so excited!
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Wed Aug 13, 2014 8:45 am
beans says...



I will be sure to check it out! I have some of my novel up, but its three chapters out of ten that I've already written
  





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Wed Aug 13, 2014 8:48 am
thewriterinside says...



Thanks, Beans, but I haven't posted the final draft of it on here yet. I'm not sure if I will. I would be happy to check out your novel, though!
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Wed Aug 13, 2014 8:55 am
beans says...



It's all there... Well, some of it, anyway. I have a couple more chapters to put up before I cut off.
  





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Wed Aug 13, 2014 9:15 am
Corncob says...



I don't know if anyone can help me here, but I seriously need help with plotting stories. Here's what I do (in rough steps):
1) Ooh, huge idea!
2) Write down a couple key points that I want to include
3) Think of a beginning and ending
And now.....I make it up as I go along! I don't know if there are going to be big changes in the plot, or when the climax (which I plan out beforehand) will happen. I don't get into small details.
Does anyone have suggestions for helping me and my style? Because....I haven't finished a story since I was 6 or 7.
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Wed Aug 13, 2014 9:38 am
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windrattlestheblinds says...



^ my instinct is to say that the "make it up as you go along" part is your problem. writing a novel by the seat of your pants can be fun, but it's also a lot harder—because if you get stuck, you have a vague, distant end point and that's about it to save you. it's really easy to write yourself into a dead-end that way.

one thing you could do, if you don't want to do a traditional outline, is write down a list of things that need to happen to carry you from beginning to end. for example, if you were writing harry potter and the sorcerer's stone, you might have a list that looks like this:

1. letters from hogwarts
2. hagrid shows up
3. diagon alley
4. hogwarts express
5. the sorting
6. making friends with ron and hermione
7. quirrell is suspicious and harry is nosy.
8. mirror of erised.
9. harry gets sent to forbidden forest for detention.
10. voldemort is killing unicorns!!!11!
11. finding out about the stone
12. dumbledore is gone
13. to the obstacle course!

or something. now, instead of making things up from beginning to end as you write, you're making things up between these sign posts. it's a lot harder to get lost between "letter from hogwarts" and "hagrid shows up" than it is between "harry is a wizard" and "harry defeats the most evil wizard of all time. again."
  





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Thu Aug 14, 2014 6:13 am
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Rosendorn says...



I plot almost exactly the same way you do, @1morestupidlovesong. I simply have a bunch of mini points in the middle, like winds described.

I basically have my plot be the alphabet. I have A, the beginning, Z, the end, and the whole alphabet in between. So B is another scene I'm really interested in writing, likewise C, D, E, ect. For a crossover fic I'm working on, it's basically a long string of Cool Plot Points that both me and my writing partner want to write and we end up filling in the blanks based on what's likely to happen as a result of those plot points.

Now, sometimes this method results in completely redoing the rest of the scenes that are interesting because you realize something happens after the latest cool scene that scraps the rest, but at least you still have a few points you'd worked on in the past. Plus, you can now go "what else would be super cool?" to keep your interest.

As for character sheets, I highly dislike them. They often don't discuss what actually drives a character forward, such as the motive. They also tends to divide up traits into "good" and "bad", therefore encouraging people to make checklists instead of people; culturally valued traits can get you in trouble and culturally frowned upon traits can get you out of trouble. It's about how you use every part of the character to make their life better/worse, not some arbitrary scale of what is "good" and "bad" (I love citing honesty as a perfect example of this. Considered a "good thing" by most of society, just think of how much trouble you'd get into if you were honest all the time. A ten minute conversation is enough for at least one lie, with the average just under three lies)

I don't really even fill out character descriptions, in part because I don't picture characters outside of body language/expression and in part because detailed descriptions never come up. I know hair/eye/skin colour, but that's about it.
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Sat Aug 16, 2014 3:07 pm
StellaThomas says...



Hahahaha what is plot

Okay so I think usually I actually prefer to get some form of story onto paper before I work on making the plot properly solid and deeper.

I think it's to do with the type of story I like and the type of story I write. Both of my most serious projects have their roots in fairytales. So The Tower Girls had the premise of: what would happen if there was another girl in Rapunzel's tower? And Chasing Dragons (my second draft is drawing to a close) had the premise of: a princess is stolen by a dragon, and her best friend sets out to save her.

The first draft of both was very simple. The witch was inherently evil in TG, the dragon in CD was a big dirty reptile. But the second draft of each changed the novels drastically. I think my writing tends to deal with characters first and plot second and then everything else afterwards. So in both, world building happened *after* my first draft, as did plot development. For instance, this draft of CD changes to being set in a particularly politically tense moment in their country's history. Magic becomes a part of their culture. Two very malformed antagonists become complicated villains. The MC's perspective widens, more characters and places come in and with each character and place more plot comes in. Is it a chaotic way to write? Both yes and no. I have an idea of my main plot points and sometimes in writing towards those I get sidetracked and the sidetracks become integral parts of the story. For instance in CD I just started writing a filler scene of Nathaniel chilling with his mate George. But then George's sister came in. And then George gave his sister a crossbow.

And bam! The crossbow was suddenly a brand new, major plot point that I had never considered until I wrote the scene.

I am outlining a fourth draft of TG as well at the moment. It's the first outline I have done for the story but it IS an outline. I already have a strong idea of the plot though from writing it three times and developing it. I find that I actually tend to get stuck in the planning stages, because I just want to get writing but feel trapped into having to plan instead. So I think that different things work differently for different people.

tl;dr version - get a first draft onto paper, see the shape of the story and then start filling it in in colour.

EDIT- re characters I do actually have a system for these. I have done them for both of these stories but in CD particularly I have dubbed them my "I know what you did last summer". These are shorts about a particular character that explore who the character was before the story begins and I get to know them a little bit better (there's one called Just One More for Charlie in my CD folder if people were interested to see what I meant). Way more fun than writing out a profile.
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