When it comes to questions about the process of writing a novel, there are three I get asked most often:
- How much planning do you have to do before you can start writing?
- How do you deal with writer’s block?
- How do you find your style?
I’m going to devote three blog posts to answering these questions in the hope that I can point people here when they ask and give them a much richer answer than I could in the moment. Here goes the first:
How much planning do you have to do before you can start writing?
None. Not unless you want it to be any good, that is.
I’ve heard it said that there are two types of writers, those who have every little thing planned out in advance, and ‘pantsers’ – those who write by the seat of their pants, never quite knowing what’s going to happen on the next page.
In practice, I suspect it’s not so much the writer that dictates the approach, but rather the type of story they are choosing to tell. An thriller or murder mystery undertaken with no knowledge of the resolution feels sure to lack satisfying intricacy, while a slice-of-life romance led by the characters is likely to feel forced or formulaic if over-planned. I’m a firm believer hat planning/pantsing is a spectrum, with few (no) writers sitting at one extreme or the other. Everybody plans something, and even the most meticulous planners occasionally wind up surprised by where their characters lead them.
Although the ‘seat of your pants’ approach sounds deeply romantic and exciting, I think my books would be vastly less exciting for the reader if I were to work this way. Consider me firmly in camp ‘plan’. Here’s a snapshot of what that process looks like for me:
On Risen Tide I spent six months planning before writing a single word of prose. The start and end of this period (Jan 1st – Jul 1st) was decided beforehand, to give me some boundaries and keep me accountable.
The end goal of this planning phase was to have a 25-30 page document, each page detailing a chapter of the book. But I don’t start there – that’s not going to happen until around month five.
Everything starts with a blank Google Doc, which will slowly and organically coalesce into sections about locations, characters, factions, culture, creatures and so forth. Some days I’m doing nothing but populating that document, racing to get all my thoughts and ideas down before they fade. Other days I barely touch the document – instead I’m spelunking down rabbit holes in dusty corners of Wikipedia. I love this part – it makes me feel like Gandalf in the archives of Minas Tirith, hunting through ancient legends, obscure inventions, and the surprisingly well-documented history of competitive cheese rolling.
After a few hours each day I ‘save’ my work by bookmarking the 20-30 browser tabs I have open, and then walk away. It’s important to give your brain space to ‘defragment’ everything you are working through, and space for new ideas to germinate.
For me, it’s important to avoid the plot for as long as possible. I know from experience that scenes and setpieces that are written down have a habit of solidifying, and become resistant to change. That’s not to say I won’t note down an idea for a cool sequence – I just try not to let it burrow its way into the actual linear cause-and-effect of the story yet.
Eventually though, the world-building will have taken shape. I’ll know who the major factions are, who the main characters are, what their fears, weaknesses and dreams are. I’ll know how the world works, and how it doesn’t. At this stage (usually about 3-4 months in) it’s time to start playing with potential plot lines. Being a child of the early 90’s, I always imagine this like watching a large JPG load on a dial up connection: first you see the size of the thing, then the rough shapes and blocks of colour, then gradually Princess Leia starts to reveal herself.
Having come from a film background where structure and pacing is far less forgiving than in a novel (see ‘Save the Cat’ by Blake Snyder), I find myself always starting with the roughest shape: the three (four) acts . At their most, most basic these are:
Act 1 – set up the world, the protagonist, and their problem
Act 2A – thrust the protagonist into a new world, meet new friends and enemies, enjoy the ‘promise of the premise’ (it’s a pirate novel – so there had better be some pirate shenanigans)
Act 2B – things get serious, the bad guys are closing in, the protagonist is heading for a fall.
Act 3 – Pulling himself out of the dumps, the hero emerges with a plan to save the day.
There are a few critical beats at the junctions between these acts (honestly, read ‘Save the Cat’) so I usually play with the story in the form of 7-8 bullet points. I’ll knock about a few versions of that for a week before moving on. It’s important to note that unlike a 2-hour movie, a novel can (and perhaps should) sustain much greater deviations from this structure – but it’s a great starting point.
Next I’m breaking things down into groups of chapters. This is just a case of adding bullet points to the acts, so now Act 2A now comprises 3-4 bullet points instead of one (Shoalhaven, Kimpakka, The Cove, West). Now my story is 12 or so bullets long. This is the most dangerous part for me – it’s very easy to cram too much in, or skew your pacing.
Next I’m breaking those bullets down further until every chapter has its own bullet point. For me, a chapter is always going to try to feel like an episode of TV with a clear beginning, middle, end, and hopefully a hanger to draw people into the next chapter. I know this is going to be about 30 minutes of reading, or about four to five thousand words. Now it’s time to be honest with myself about how much I can (or should) cram into each chapter, and how long the finished manuscript will be. I was aiming for 125,000 words with Risen Tide, and ended up overshooting by about 13,000 – nearly three chapters’ worth.
Next is the part I love most – now I get to give each chapter a few bullet points of its own. Then I go through and give them all a few more. Gradually I start to figure out exactly where the hero finds that clue, or when they have that key conversation with their nemesis. Nothing is too firm yet – it’s like a game or Tetris, or a jigsaw puzzle. The opportunity to make rapid changes at this stage will never be repeated – once I get into writing prose even simple 2-second changes can take days (and I won’t want to make them, even if I know I should).
It’s easy to see how we get from here to the end goal of one page per chapter – but I’m wary of leaping ahead too fast. I built three versions of this structure before moving on. Honestly, with every step you take toward prose you are sacrificing experimentation and flexibility. It’s important to take your time and play.
At this stage I should be able to tell the story. I tell it to my friends, my wife, my kids, my cat. If I can’t tell it, or I get stuck, or they get confused, I know there is something janky. That’s not a failure – this is exactly what this stage of the process is for – I do not want to find out when I’ve already committed 100,000 words to paper.
On Risen Tide, by the time I was ready to start turning each chapter into a page, my planning document was 73,278 words long. That’s one chapter short of the first Harry Potter book. I wasn’t kidding when I said I was firmly in the planning camp…
At this stage I had written prose for a novel once before, but not solo (that’s a tale for another day). This would be the first time I was setting sail by myself, and I was a little nervous. Six months of planning had prepared me for what I was about to tackle, but it had done nothing to reduce my sense of quite how enormous the task ahead was. But first – just a page per chapter. Easy. I sat down and wrote two-thirds of a side of A4 detailing the prologue.
Piece of cake.
Then I moved on to Chapter One. I had a neat idea that maybe the first bullet-point scene ‘Jymn working aboard the Trossul’ could start with Jymn watching a magfly testing his weld.
I wrote:
“The tiny magfly crawled across the steel plate, two of its eight legs prodding and testing the new joint for weakness — any break in the metal surface where it could begin to gnaw at the rich ferrous within.
Jymn Hatcher watched, studying the creature, his good eye squinting at the jerking mechanical movements that would reveal any flaw in his work — any void or cavity in the weld-bead that held fast the latest patch in the great steel patchwork that made up the ship’s hull.”
You might notice that’s not detail – that’s prose. And that was it – the words started pouring out and suddenly I wasn’t writing a one-page summary of each chapter any longer. The ship had left the harbour and I was writing the whole damn book.
This ‘sneak attack’ approach has gone on to be one of my favourite ‘brain hacks’. If ever I’m putting something off or procrastinating, it’s usually because on some level I’m afraid of tackling it. By getting right up adjacent to it, armed with everything I need, you can almost blur the threshold between not-started-yet and oh-shit-I’ve-started-now. And then you just have to strap in and let momentum take you where it will.
Until the writers’ block strikes. But that’s a blog post all of its own.
What’s your process? Does it look anything like mine? Are you one of these mythical ‘pantsers’? If so – how in the hell does that work?
