Huuu, my first blog post on IYC. Nice! Well, what shall I talk about?
Today, I want to talk about how I came upon my personal method for dealing with probably the most important aspect of writing a book: Plot Construction.
This has happened to me and I bet it has happened to any author who first found himself with the prospective of writing a book. You got this great idea, you’re rearing to write, but the problem is, that’s all you have. An idea. You don’t have the whole manuscript typewritten in your head right off the bat, you just know what you want the story to be about. You need to fine-polish that thought, add details, progression and pacing to turn it into a bona-fide story.
And this is where I found myself braking when I first approached writing with my first novel -not Proud Parents Blog, but an italian one done with a vanity press, called La guerra delle Reliquie- and was I pissed. Imagine my frustration. I hadn’t typed one word and yet I was already stuck. I told myself: ‘Wait, wait, wait. I have no idea how the story will progress. I can’t go into this cock-sure. I have to plan ahead. Plan everything.�
This how I chanced upon the first method of story-writing, which I call The Steel Planner method. If you’re a writer who uses this method, you’ll have experienced these symptoms:
1. You have a tendency to plan a story’s progression inside-out before starting to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) 2. You rarely write a scene without already knowing how it will develop 3. You make a lot of lists and diagrams to keep note of everything you come up with, usually in separate files instead of making one big Novelpedia 4. You already know all the reveals and secrets of the book, when they will happen and how and the characters' reaction before the scene actually happens
This is as safe as you can get. You plan so much before actually writing that when you do, everything will go smoothly together. Smoother than normal, at least. But there’s a big risk involved with this kind of method. A risk called the editor.
These mythical figures, whose job is to check for factual accuracy and other errors or rough angles that contained into your opera may be your undoing, Steel Planner. Imagine that. After all your work and your planning, your efforts to tie together all the elements of the book, from the minor character who finds the Graal before being murdered by the Dragon -TVTropes make everything funnier- to the structural defect of the BigBad’s stronghold’s door. Then, this phantasm comes along and tells you that ‘Hmm, just so you know, I think you should change ³Ù³ó¾±²õâ€�.
There’s the big risk involved with planning everything from the beginning: other people. What may be good for you may not be good for your intended audience or your proof-readers. You may have unintentionally put something that sounded cool but that is realistically impossible -even in your book’s universe- or you just may have had an oversight. Either way, the great defect of the Steel Planner is that the final result may lack the flexibility to easily overcome such hurdles. The more you tie everything together, the more time you spent planning everything at the beginning, the harder it can be to get through everything later down the road, unless your proof-reader likes everything you’ve put down on paper. You can be that good, but if you’re not? What if you just want to add another chapter, a scene you hadn’t thought of before but you want to add now? How can you do it without breaking your precious flow?
After going through the entire line of thinking, I told myself: ‘No. That won’t do. I’m not that experienced. Also, I want to get to writing right now, damn it!� So, why not do just that? It didn’t have to be that hard, right?
But as I quickly learned, it wasn’t going to be that easy either...
Huuu, my first blog post on IYC. Nice! Well, what shall I talk about?
Today, I want to talk about how I came upon my personal method for dealing with probably the most important aspect of writing a book: Plot Construction.
This has happened to me and I bet it has happened to any author who first found himself with the prospective of writing a book. You got this great idea, you’re rearing to write, but the problem is, that’s all you have. An idea. You don’t have the whole manuscript typewritten in your head right off the bat, you just know what you want the story to be about. You need to fine-polish that thought, add details, progression and pacing to turn it into a bona-fide story.
And this is where I found myself braking when I first approached writing with my first novel -not Proud Parents Blog, but an italian one done with a vanity press, called La guerra delle Reliquie- and was I pissed. Imagine my frustration. I hadn’t typed one word and yet I was already stuck. I told myself: ‘Wait, wait, wait. I have no idea how the story will progress. I can’t go into this cock-sure. I have to plan ahead. Plan everything.�
This how I chanced upon the first method of story-writing, which I call The Steel Planner method. If you’re a writer who uses this method, you’ll have experienced these symptoms:
1. You have a tendency to plan a story’s progression inside-out before starting to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard)
2. You rarely write a scene without already knowing how it will develop
3. You make a lot of lists and diagrams to keep note of everything you come up with, usually in separate files instead of making one big Novelpedia
4. You already know all the reveals and secrets of the book, when they will happen and how and the characters' reaction before the scene actually happens
This is as safe as you can get. You plan so much before actually writing that when you do, everything will go smoothly together. Smoother than normal, at least. But there’s a big risk involved with this kind of method. A risk called the editor.
These mythical figures, whose job is to check for factual accuracy and other errors or rough angles that contained into your opera may be your undoing, Steel Planner. Imagine that. After all your work and your planning, your efforts to tie together all the elements of the book, from the minor character who finds the Graal before being murdered by the Dragon -TVTropes make everything funnier- to the structural defect of the BigBad’s stronghold’s door. Then, this phantasm comes along and tells you that ‘Hmm, just so you know, I think you should change ³Ù³ó¾±²õâ€�.
There’s the big risk involved with planning everything from the beginning: other people. What may be good for you may not be good for your intended audience or your proof-readers. You may have unintentionally put something that sounded cool but that is realistically impossible -even in your book’s universe- or you just may have had an oversight. Either way, the great defect of the Steel Planner is that the final result may lack the flexibility to easily overcome such hurdles. The more you tie everything together, the more time you spent planning everything at the beginning, the harder it can be to get through everything later down the road, unless your proof-reader likes everything you’ve put down on paper. You can be that good, but if you’re not? What if you just want to add another chapter, a scene you hadn’t thought of before but you want to add now? How can you do it without breaking your precious flow?
After going through the entire line of thinking, I told myself: ‘No. That won’t do. I’m not that experienced. Also, I want to get to writing right now, damn it!� So, why not do just that? It didn’t have to be that hard, right?
But as I quickly learned, it wasn’t going to be that easy either...