The Joy of Plotting or "There's Gotta Be a Pony in There Somewhere."

I think the greatest benefit of plotting out a story before you write is the idea that you'll know where you're going when you get to the end.

As you all know, I'm gearing up for NaNoWriMo 2014 and the novel I'm going to attempt to get 50,000 words into is based on a few ideas I've had and a couple themes I want to explore.
As well, it's a case of living vicariously through the main character a bit, as well as through a couple of the other characters.

The chief reason I'm plotting this novel out ahead of time is the fact that I have a schedule of roughly 1700 words a day to pump out and there's no way, I think, that I'd be able to just "go" at that pace without knowing beforehand where I am headed every day, in terms of developing the story.

So, I've gone onto Scrivener and used the 'corkboard' to plot out 55 chapters.

The outline's pretty sketchy so far, only a sentence or two describing the overall action in those chapters.

However, it's a road-map.

I know how the story starts, how it proceeds, the plot-points and complications that confront the 'hero' and how he resolves them.

If I shoot for a thousand words a chapter, I'll be able to easily top the 50k word goal by November 30.

And, if I somehow manage to complete 2 chapters worth of rough draft a day, I'll actually either hit my goal early or hit 60k words in November (Granted this is a long shot...10,000 extra words is a bit much to ask for, especially while trying to have a life as well.)

At the beginning of drafting my outline, I was lost and a bit overwhelmed because of inexperience.

Traditionally, I'd be a 'pantser' in writing my shorter fiction and tended to let the 'story lead it to it."
However, in a time constraint like NaNo, I can't afford to dead-end a storyline 20k words into it; even wasting a day's writing time can be fatal to my attempt.

So, I made myself learn to plot.
I kind of think of it like learning to code, if you're a programmer, because they are both basic skills that help you understand the underlying structure.

I've had discussions where I was told that over-plotting killed the spontaneity of the novel and made it formulaic... I respond that Frank Lloyd Wright probably knew where his toilets were supposed to go before he started building his houses.
'Framing' a story properly frees you to be innovative....if you know how scenes connect, you can play around with how those scenes play out...

It also saves you heart-ache if you know that Character A will do X in chapter 40, so you can't have him do X in chapter 20 or that he suddenly can't do X because you made him do Y 50 pages earlier, which made doing X impossible, which is sucky if X was going to be the plot twist you needed to resolve Act 2 and set up for the ending.

Ultimately, I think the best argument for plotting is that it gets you to the point that you need to get to in order to finish your novel, what I call Draft 1.0, a complete workable draft from which you can do revisions and change the plot-points that seem clunky and the scenes that seem superfluous suddenly.
Plotting doesn't mean that you etch your ideas in stone, it merely means that you pencil them in, make a draft and then move onto revisions, which is where the work really starts.

Why 'False Attachment' will kill your writing.

I'm finishing a novel. Actually, I'm working on two right now... One is my NaNoWriMo novel that I'm plotting and doing all that crazy fun prep stuff for. A lot of the ideas for that are coming fast, furious and often, being dumped just as fast.

The other novel is the one I started in Sarah Sheard's class in the fall of 1996, so a lot of that has been kicking around for 2 decades now.

Actually, only about 6,000 words of it are from then. The other 8,000 or so I've put on it since re-starting my writing has been written in the last couple months.

Most of that, while I think is interesting and potentially useful, I have no issue with altering and cutting from the manuscript.

I'm a lot less willing to dump the early stuff simply because it's been around so long. It's become calcified and part of my past.

 "But, but...I wrote that in that cafe just off Baldwin, where that cute girl was and it was that summer and OH THE MEMORIES!!!"

Still doesn't make the draft any less shitty. And the fact of the matter is, it doesn't represent where I am right now in the novel and where I want to go. So, bit by bit, section by section, it's being eroded and replaced by a retcon of the first section.

The lesson here is never be afraid to put on your big boy or girl pants and kill your darlings, no matter how old they've gotten.

The Joy of Shitty Notebooks

       Years ago, back in the early 80s, I was seriously into Kerouac and Jim Morrison and Patti Smith and Lou Reed and a bunch of other "rebels' that appeal to the faux-anarchic tendencies of suburban white kids who really have no reason to rebel.

And the thing that I really loved finding out about was the publication some of their notebooks.

If you ask any writer who started writing before the advent of storeable data, you'll pretty much find that they wrote their ideas in notebooks, to work through an idea before committing to the work of typing it out.

With the 'greats'(famous writers) these notebooks were a look into the 'rough' work, the stuff that sometimes never made it into their polished drafts

Now, of course, everyone and their brother has a laptop or tablet and the drafts get put into memory somewhere somehow.

And it's shifted the way we write, I think. Instead of distinct drafts of work, we tend to 'over-write' our mistakes, highlighting the passages that don't quite work and then backspacing them into oblivion.

And I think we're losing something by doing that.

Which is why I love paper notebooks.

The cheaper the better.

Crane and moleskin and a host of other makers have lines of notebooks that are works of art and craft. leather binding surrounding rich cream-covered heavy paper...paper that cries out to be written on with a fine three-hundred dollar fountain pen...

But you can't bear to violate that kind of book with mere scribbling...mere "hunches"....

With dollar store notebooks, who cares?
They are designed to be disposable.
Hilroy makes an 80 page spiral notebook that is perfect for writing in and near back to school time, the local chain stores have them on for next to nothing, sometimes literally so... I picked up 50 this year for 5c each.

At that price, who cares if I write stuff that never goes anywhere or takes a while to get there?

But having the freedom to fail lets me try ideas and brainstorm and just follow something I think might work out.... And often it does, if sometimes not in the way I thought.

Heck, I've written stuff for one story, only to have an epiphany that it's perfect for another story.

The more we allow ourselves freedom to not have to write 'good' writing, the more chances we are willing to take.
The more chances we take, the more possibilities there are to create something that surprises us and surprises the reader.


   

I've been writing since I was a bout 14 or so, although I've been making stories up since I was a kid.

I guess I got 'permission' to be a Writer when my friend's dad said one day, after watching me spin a pretty convoluted tale out of a GI Joe, a picket fence and a rose bush, "Boy, you need to do something with that imagination of yours."

I've run hot and cold with my writing for years and and that's been a big regret because I've always thought I had something as a writer, if only I could muster the discipline and organization to work on it.

I know that sounds a tad egotistical, but isn't ego what you need to get ahead in most things?

This year has been the longest stretch that I've continued with writing. So far, it's been almost every day since the summer that some form of writing gets done.

NaNoWriMo's coming up and I'll write more about that as it happens.

Flying Pants

One of the discussion that I've been having over the last few days with one of my oldest friends has been about the nature of creativity.

I've known him since we in a High School play way back in 1982. Before going off onto different careers in the late 80s, we were in a band and an improv troupe together, wrote songs and skits and critiqued each of these with each other and various other people.

Danny is a novelist, as am I..... However, we've found that we have very different approaches to writing.

Danny's a classic "Pantser"; He loves getting an idea and figuring out where it goes by sitting down and writing, using his 'muse' as his GPS on the trip through the novel, listening to where it says to turn.

Frankly, I blame it on his parents: Classic ex-Hippies who were constantly inventing dinner on the fly at the last moment and who vacationed by opening a map, figuring out how far and back they could get on a couple hundred bucks of gas and randomly picking a destination within that area (I might be exaggerating a tad).

I grew up with Old School shirt and tie/Dress with pearls Conservatives who planned their vacations  and made reservations months ahead.

My Dad was also a Journalist and Ghost Writer/ "Rewrite Man" who wrote untold hundreds of articles and columns in his career, both under his byline and without one.

From him I learned the need to know where you are going in a piece of writing. You need to know what the elements of the writing are going to convey. And you need to deliver on your promise to the reader.

But I  also rebelled in my youth; I wrote poetry in one take, for Open Mic Nights,often finishing the poem on the fly with the spotlight heating up my face. I got up on an improv stage with the barest of suggestions and went down the rabbit hole of a skit with my team mates just to see where it went. 

I spit rhymes and dropped dimes and had the sickest rhythms every damn time...Ok, maybe not THAT...

Somewhere along the line though, Dad won out.

When I write now,I have no need to know what every single character is going  to say on every page for the next hundred pages, but I do know I really feel better if I know where the next few chapters are going, if only in a general way.

Why my Eng. Lit. degree hasn't made me a better writer.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was about 12 or so. I remember standing in my Grade 8 Drama, sorry Miss Jenkins..."Thee-ah-tah Ahts" class and being asked to create a character sketch and having the epiphany that "Hey, with acting or writing, I can pretend to be anything I want."

Fast forward twenty something years to me sitting outside the Continuing Education office at the University of Toronto and looking at the  brochure for a  program called "Pre-University", designed for people like me who were older (I was 34 at the time) who wanted to go to university but lacked the regular prerequisites.
Out of the four streams from which you could choose, I went with Pre-Literature, which, 13 years of part-time studies later, led to a degree in English Literature and Modern History.

Neither of which has made me a better writer. Ok, of fiction...I've certainly become pretty good at writing the shallow, sycophantic essays that pass for undergraduate scholarship these days.

I just never learned how to be a better fiction writer by reading Shakespeare, Austen or Dickens.

Most of the big I "Instruction" I had on writing was a delightful 10 week class taught in the 90s by Sarah Sheard.

The rest I learned by writing...and writing...and writing...

And reading WHILE I was writing something, which helped me because when I'm writing, I run into specific issues and reading the work of authors I admire gives me an insight into how THEY deal with the problems I have, like pacing and character revelation and building up suspense in a story.

If I were ever to, in another life, become an English Lit. Prof., I would teach the classics like a Writer, rather than a scholar. I would point out HOW Austen paces her novel and how we get to know the characters.

I think it would make for a better class and something the students would retain longer.

When I heard about ROW80 as an alternative to NaNo, I was liking it more and more. No hard deadline (50,000 words in 30 days) 267% more time to do the challenge (80 days instead of 30).


However, and this was the best part for me, I get to choose my own goal.

 Of course, the point of making this useful is to make the goal something that actually achieves something. Years ago, I had a goal of writing everyday, something my writing coach at the time told me to do. I did, but often the entry would be " There. I wrote today. Goodbye"

Something like " Write 1,000 words  every day." or "Write for 30 minutes every day for a month." will do more to get and keep me on track than a vague goal.

So far, I've been pretty good. I've written, if not every day, most days, to the point where I definitely feel my habit muscles building.

And, if I'm not writing text, I'm spending time working on the outline or fleshing out characters or concepts of the novel(s)

This is a good thing, I know.