To Plot or Not To Plot

I make it all up as I go along.

I've read a bit about this, but can't remember anything. I'm sure if there is a plot your characters will find it.

Yes, either change the colour of paper...or write something.

Some ideas I find only have enough weight to go so far. I'm trying to write a ghost story just now. Probably max 4000 words. That's the weight I'd attribute before I start. Other pieces may be longer. It's a feeling about these things. I don't know.

I'd have a good idea of the characters, what the setting is, and some idea of what the novel is about. Also I'd want to know how it ends. Then just start. As I'm writing I tend to make notes about what happens next as the ideas come to me but these generally change.

A technique I've found very helpful is called single line outlining. Basically you just bash out the elements of the plot as you think of them, as single lines (they must not wrap over to the next line). This can be quite liberating because you're not actually writing anything that anyone is going to read. It's purely a guide for you. So you can use abbreviations, bad grammar, bad spelling etc. The beauty of this approach is that as the plot starts to take shape you can very quickly see where there are potential problems or weak points and fix them. It's also dead easy to shuffle chapters around, change the sequence of events, insert new characters, add extra subplots etc without having to do too much work. Once you've completely plotted the story in this way and are happy that it moves along at the right pace and rises and falls in the right places, you can then actually write it. What I like best about this technique is that it helps you identify plotting errors very quickly and stops you taking too many wrong turnings. It also breaks down the task of writing something long and complicated (and seemingly impossible) into manageable parts.

Drew is exactly right, that's all you need. NaNoWriMo people are always going on about 'plotting' their novels. Apart from being a form of words which annoys me for no good reason, it always strikes me as an huge waste of time and energy. Ideas quickly race ahead of you when you actually write, plus simply banging out scenes in accordance with a pre-written outline sounds deathly boring. There was in an article in Salon last year (you may need to click through an advert) about a crowd-sourced twitter novel. In it the author says: Remarkably few single-person authors outline their plots in advance of writing. Many, like the science-fiction novelist Samuel Delany, report that they start out with a few images and then see where their intuition leads them. "Among those stories that strike us as perfectly plotted, with those astonishing endings both a complete surprise and a total satisfaction," Delaney once wrote, "it is amazing how many of their writers will confess that the marvelous resolution was as much a surprise for them as it was for the reader." It's an interesting article, the resulting story was, predictably, garbage (nobody expected anything else it seems), but the way in which it failed reveals a lot about what it takes to write a story.

I think every writer is different and it's crazy for any of us to say that this or that technique is better or worse. The only thing that matters is what works for you. I find that plotting works brilliantly for me because it saves me huge amounts of time. I would much rather discover a problem with my plot after writing a 4,000 word outline than when I get to the 67,000th word of my novel and realise the whole thing is starting to unravel. As a writer I like to think of myself as having a professional approach. I cannot imagine an architect winging it when creating a building, so why should I expect to wing it when writing something as substantial as a novel? But as I say, that's just me. There are many writers who wing it and achieve good results. We all have to choose the method that best fits our style of working.

Niki, I haven't written anything for 5 - 6 months. I don't know if I want to do it anymore. What next?

It will make no difference to anyone else if you don't write anything. But it may make a difference to you, because it has become part of your identity. It's one of those pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You look up and check to see that everyone else is the same as you, and if we find you're not writing, we'll come and get you...

I'm currently editing my first novel - I usually write short stories. For my book, I used index cards. I bought a box, and some white and some blue index cards for it. Then I used the blue cards for the characters - in alphabetical order - and for each character I wrote a short bio - age, appearance, mannerisms, job, where they live - anything that is of importance - so that I could easily pick one up to check vital details, such as when I forgot how old a character was meant to be. The white cards I used for chapters, and put a quick synopsis of what happened in each chapter. You can add things as you go along that are important as you write them. So, for instance if I wanted to know when Mrs Smith's dog got run over, a quick flip through the chapters and I found it - Mrs Smith and her dog are not in my book btw! It worked really well for me because everything was to hand if I needed to check up on something. I never completely plot then write. I start off with a rough idea and sit down to write, and the rest evolves as I'm writing it, which I kind of like because I can change things completely if I want to. However, I do have a complete story in mind for my next novel, which will be turned into a script as it's a thriller that would be good as a 3 or 5 part serial.