How To Plot – Monkey Style!

As promised, here is a run-through of my personal method of plotting. And now that I've finally got a day off errm...completed the images for this post, I can get cracking. :D

Plotting a Novel

Dictionary.com defines 'to plot' it as "to devise or construct the storyline of (a play, novel etc.)." It also defines it as "to plan secretly, especially something hostile or evil." Both seem to fit here.

It's a word that's potentially a very scary and/or confusing one. But plotting doesn't have to be a difficult process. It doesn't even have to take long. :)

Let's plot something together. I'm going to use an incomplete story of mine to show examples, "The Chrysanthemum Curtains" or CC for short.

Depending a little on the story, I like to plot at about medium level on the detail scale. But everything always starts off super simple.

And I mean like super-dooper-über simple.

Step One - The Sentence

The first seed of your to-be bestseller: a sentence (two at most) that covers the core of your story. This is what I had for CC:

"A mysterious writer who's never seen lives in a cottage in the woods and ne

ver leaves her house. A young journalist stumbles on the house by accident and begins to learn her story through her writings."

Unless you're starting off from the point that 'I want to write a story, but I haven't any ideas yet," you might have a story idea in your mind already which you'd like to write. In that case, Step One is already done. :)

Step Two - Detail

Okay, so far we've about 25 words or so to work with. We can't write a novel with that yet, so let's add a little detail. Just a few sentences to add a few more specifics to the above.

"The novel is Historical Fiction and set in England in the 1860s. The young male journalist never sees or speaks to the mysterious writer, but each night a light burns in the first floor window (the window with the chrysanthemum curtains). Every so often an A4 envelope with a manuscript inside has been passed underneath the front door. Reading these, the journalist sees her incredible talent and begins to publish them for her under a pen name, learning her personal story through the fantasy she writes."

Okay, that's a bit better. We can now get some kind of quick idea what the story is about all the way through. This outline is about the length of what you'd tell a friend or a relative when asked what you're writing.

Don't worry if you can't figure out your genre or a title for your novel yet. I just happened to have them here already, but often it happens to me that I figure those out about halfway through writing the first draft of the manuscript. If you don't know them, don't worry, just don't get hung up here trying to come up with the perfect name. It's more important that you get your beauty plotted and written. Fear not fellow novelist, the perfect title will come to you sooner or later. ;)

Step Three - Beginning and Ending

For me it's important to know the beginning and ending of a story. Not word for word, but the idea. For CC:

Beginning: "Young journalist living his ordinary life, believing the mundane is all there is and fantasy and magic to be silly and not real."

Ending: "The secretive writer the journalist came to know through the stories she passed under her door vanishes, apparently dying. The journalist ends up having a wider concept of truth and life and opens his mind to new ideas, ultimately becoming a more successful person."

If I don't know the beginning, of course I can't start writing a manuscript. If I don't know the ending, sooner or later my writing will begin to wander aimlessly resulting in 'loose ends' that are both confusing and (potentially) irritating to the reader.

For me, it also makes it harder to write. So I make sure I clearly define where I'm starting and where my characters are heading very early on.

Step Four - Sketching

Time to do a Picasso. Better be good! :)

Nah, just kidding. But we are going to be doing a little drawing here to help with figuring out the rest of the story, and putting the ideas into order.

Draw a single line down a page with two small horizontal lines at the end and the beginning of that line. At the top we're going to write the beginning in two or three words: "MMC* meets novelist" at the top, and "onto a new life" at the bottom. That should do. This is just a list, no need for more detail. You're probably not going to have the page space for it either though. ^_^

Now draw three more small lines somewhere between The Beginning and The End. These can be the three main culmination points of the story. The first point will be where your main characters first encounter some opposition. They've got a plan, or a mission, or they simply want to continue to exist peacefully, and then something (often the thing that will be the main antagonist throughout the story) appears that tries to stop them or make them fail.

For Frodo it was the hooded riders, for the Little Mermaid it was her father forbidding her from being in contact with humans.

For our CC story, it could be the selfish editor-in-chief who despises anything creative and wants to use his naive junior colleague to defame her and get her into legal trouble.

Either way, this is where the main baddie steps, or some barrier appears for the first time and our story really starts.

Next line could mark where the main characters are apparently, or risking, failing in their purpose. Things are looking bad, and like the main character(s) are going to fail or have very few chances left. This bit is often very close to the biggest battle of the story.

The last line should be the 'big fight,' where your main protagonist and antagonist meet. It could be a light sabre fight, it could be a chess match. But regardless it's the big highlight of the story.

Now that we've got a little filling between The Beginning and The End, draw in as many even smaller lines as you want between those we've got. Here we write similar short notes on roughly what we think might happen between each point.

It's also not a big deal right now if we don't get the order of the events right. At the latest things will get sorted in editing. So I just stick what I think sort of feels right where I sort of think it might possibly go...or not. :)

Step Five - Writing it Out

This is what I like to do. I take an A5 notebook of 40 pages long and dedicate that as the plot book of one novel (which is intended to be around 50,000 words or more). Then I take each event and write it out a little more thoroughly.

So instead of it being "big fight" I write "Main character meets antagonist on roof. Emotions flair up, MMC takes revenge. Bad guy falls to his death." Something like this. And in this way I write out, with just a tad more detail, each item that we wrote up in the diagram above.

And that's it. That's my plotting technique. :) Personally I often have a pretty clear idea of the most major events of a story, so I like to Four and Five the other way around (so I write up the scenes and then do a little diagram to clear up what order everything happened in). Since it's my personal of plotting, this method might not fit everyone. But I hope I may have inspired some ideas about how to approach plotting for those who wish to try. :)

Now that we've got a basic view of our story as a whole, we're ready to write the first draft. This draft is not going to be the final version, but just another step of adding on more detail from before. At this point competitions like NaNoWriMo are very helpful if you feel like you need motivation to get the writing done (like I often do ^_^;;). And always remember what awaits you at the other end of the road of writing: a beautiful finished manuscript ready for publishing! :D

Next time I'll be talking about what I do for troubleshooting when I run into difficulties with a story during plotting or writing.

If anyone has any questions about this plotting technique or plotting in general, feel free to comment and I'll do my best to answer. :)

Thanks for reading!

(*MMC is short for 'male main character.')

(Frodo and Lord of the Rings is copyrighted to JRR Tolkien and The Little Mermaid to Disney. The original story of The Little Mermaid was written by Hans Christian Andersen.)

WT*: Plotter VS Pantser

Alright. Here, finally, is the post I've been meaning to write for a month. It was inspired by one of Kathrine Roid's posts on the same subject, which for the life of me I cannot find again for some reason. :-P

I don't know if this can exactly be qualified as a "writing technique," but if nothing else I'll be using it as a means to enter into that sphere.

In her post, Kathrine wrote that she identified herself more as a pantser** than a plotter. Funnily enough, I've always identified myself more as a planner, sometimes even 'compulsory planner,' and have only recently dabbled in the scary and forbidden art known as pantsing. No one can tell you which suits your style best except you. Some feel planning and then writing is like writing a novel twice which takes the thrill out of it. Others, like myself, feel they need some kind of map of the world they're adventuring into in order to feel confident they'll make it to the other side. My advice is that it's best to try out both styles and see in practice which one fits you best.

Here are a few pros and cons of planning from my opinion:

PROS

1) You know where you're going. And most of the time that results in not getting lost along the way. Fewer days of "oh good cow, my character needs to get to the other side of that river in the next three days and they're out in the sahara." This can make writing a whole novel much easier and less excruciating. When I wrote Electrostatic Fantasy for the first time, I plotted the scene sequence out for the most part and 50,000 felt easy. There were only a couple points at which I lost momentum. But otherwise it was only down to sitting my butt down and writing, not being put off because I had no ideas. And I also felt that that kept the story interesting for me, another thing which inspired me to write.

2) You can handle the barriers before you get to them. A plot is like a summary of the novel in your head. Thoughts can be such fickle things. Kind of like the surface of a pond, they look so crystal clear when you're gazing at them, but when you try to move them around they flicker and jumble about. And then you're not sure what exactly went where. A plot helps you arrange those ideas a little and helps to spot (and of course handle) the biggest and baddest plot troubles that exist. For example, you know Prince Charming will charge the dragon's keep on the other side of the kingdom at the end, but you'd forgotten that you killed his horse in chapter two. How's he going to get there in less than a month? The more detailed you get, the more you'll pick up finer flaws. But the key is to keep it a 'plot,' so straying on the simple side is best.

3) It can be inspiring. It's like getting a first small glimpse at all the best bits in your novel. Like those commercials of movies that show you clips of the exciting or funny parts, you'll be getting a "sneak" preview of what's to come in your novel. Especially once I'd figured out the ending, I couldn't wait to get cracking and get to the later parts which I really wanted to write.

CONS

a) It doesn't always work. Even if you're a veteran plotter, it doesn't always guarantee a smooth ride. A novel of mine, which is incomplete for now, gave me such plotting troubles that you'll most likely hear me gripe on about it until publishing day and beyond. I re-plotted Arkanos - Memorycatcher at least four times. Yes, four times, nearly from scratch per go. The more you plot the more you learn to pick up what exactly is the trouble with any particular bit. But even so you can (and possibly will) run into stories that have you scratching your head anyway.

b) You can lose sight of it. A plot is supposed to be a short summary, like a rough diagram of your story to give you some direction and foresight. But it's possible to get too into it and lose sight of keeping it simple. I strayed there, and started to feel like it was too much work. Of course it was a lot of work, I was basically writing the story out!

c) You can rely too heavily on it. Getting comfortable with doing plotting because it's your style is fine. But relying too much on your plotting notes can land you in a fix. I was writing a scene once and realised I had to add a new dialogue to it. But I hadn't plotted this. I was frozen for a moment, thinking what I should do and how I would do it. You mustn't forget that you're the writer, the source, the all-powerful god that rules over your domain that is your novel. If it isn't written in the plot, the you need to create it then and there. A manual on how to write your own book doesn't exist anywhere. You bringing it to life is what makes it magic. :)

Overall

I prefer plotting over pantsing myself because it normally helps me write more effectively. I get inspired and motivated and often manage to pick up the worst troubles before NaNoWriMo begins, rather than getting stuck with them in the middle of it. But pantsing (the approach I've taken with the SkAI Butterfly) feels rather therapeutic. It's fun to "just write" instead of figuring it all out before hand. And especially if you're not exactly even sure what the story will be about, just beginning to type can be a form of plotting in itself. You're writing it to figure it out.

Well, those were my thoughts on Plotting VS Pantsing. What do you guys think? What do you reckon are the Pros and Cons of pantsing? Which style suits you best?

Next time (once I get around to it ^_^) I'll be writing about how to plot by outlining my own technique.

Until then ;)

*WT is short for 'writing technique(s)'

**Pantser is a NaNoWriMo term that means that you 'fly by the seat of your pants' when you are writing your novel. You have nothing but the absolute basics planned out for your novel.

This attitude towards writing is often opposed by the 'planner', who knows exactly what is going to happen, when it will happen, and where it will happen. Sourced from urbandictionary.com.

Maybe It's Time...

...To get out of the slump.

Man, I thought employed life was supposed to improve your writing production, not reduce it. But hey, guess I read the wrong manual on my way to the interview. It's really been a long time since I blogged. A really long time. And it's also about time I got up and out of it.

Yes, when I get home from work it's so much easier to slump down with a good video game and think four things: Can Not Be Bothered. At first this was my preference. I was tired. I'm not used to standing for 8 hours on end, and the mere thought of thinking once I got home was too exhausting. But it's surprising what it takes away from you, the not writing at all that is. Life becomes...sort of empty, and less colourful. I didn't really notice it until I was reminded of the

thought of exciting adventures in fantasy worlds and sitting for hours in the same spot at a café typing away at your laptop. :D With a good cup of tea and...

Okay, straying off the subject a little. You get what I mean though. :)

Alright, I wanted to thank everyone who has voted on the poll in the top right-hand corner of the page. Looking at it I see photos/pictures for the blog as well as writing techniques are on the wishlist. I will definitely work on getting some more photos up here. Mind you they might be random photos I've shot sometime whilst half-asleep. I'll have to ask you to excuse that.

I'll also add a writing techniques related post as well, now that I'm at the computer. I'll post it separately though.

But E.F.'s edits are moving. At last they are moving! And boy am I happy. :D

And it's good to be back in business. Or blogging...whichever fits better.