Revelation

I’m going to tell you one of the reasons I love writing.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I’ll begin.

RETREAT!

It is possible you’ve heard enough from me about my latest writing endeavour. I picture you sitting there going, ‘stop bloody writing about writing, woman, and get on with WRITING!’ But think what a fool you’ll feel in x-number of years when you’ve spurned these insights into my creative process and I’ve turned out to be the you-know-who of the 2020s. Ha! There you’ll be, sitting there like the editor who sent a standard rejection to Robert Galbraith telling him to join a writers’ group and read the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook…

Enough…

So, if you’ve been keeping up, you’ll know that my friend Gill and I have been on a do-it-yourself writers’ retreat (little wave to Gill – she’ll read to the end, even if YOU don’t – thanks Gill!). I stress the ‘do-it-yourself’ because writers’ retreats exist in many different forms: some cost money (writing turns out to be much more expensive than you’d think); some are in exotic locations (too distracting, plus also expensive); some you have to apply for (NO! It’s bad enough getting publisher rejections)… Our retreat involved three days of me and Gill staying at Gill’s house in the very unspringlike Scottish Highlands with no dogs and no people. And I also chose to have no internet.

bit bleak for me

So for a good amount of time, Gill and I sat in separate rooms in front of our computers. I’ve no idea how much time we actually worked per day. Five hours? Six? Not much more than that. It was enough. Every couple of hours we’d stop and eat or drink or go for walks in the wet and the cold (it’s good though, clears your head so that when you sit down at the computer again anything’s possible). And we talked and talked and talked, about what we were writing and writing in general and the state of the world and our lives and books we loved and … everything.

And when we weren’t talking and walking and eating and sleeping, I made my plan.

It’s a beautiful thing, my plan. It’s the skeleton of the book I’m going to write. I’ve mapped out forty-nine scenes on a spreadsheet. For the first time, I’ve taken into account all the things I’ve been finding out about plotting: I started by thinking of the book in terms of three sections, beginning, middle and end, each with an inciting incident, complications, a crisis, a resolution. I thought about my genre (genres actually) and what the obligatory scenes of these genres were. I thought about the one true thing I want my novel to express and how I would make sure that the story told that truth.

Using this method of rules and structure is an experiment for me. All those things – inciting incidents, obligatory scenes and the like – have always sounded like unnecessarily complex jargon to me. I am sure that the novels I have written or partially written previously have taken them into account even though I did not deliberately set them out before I started, but rather found them in the course of the writing. I felt that considering a story in such a technical way before starting might be more of a barrier than a help. It seemed to me that the natural structure of a story is just that, something that comes naturally.

As well as my scene-by-scene plan, I have created a character spreadsheet with details about each character from what they look like to what their favourite TV programme is. I also started to map out the three books that I plan to follow this one, but by the time I started on that it was the afternoon of day 3 and I’d had enough. That’ll have to wait.

The next stage is to write. I already have 12,000 words, random pieces I’ve written when they popped into my head and I hadn’t yet done my daily 500 words. I have two other books I’m working on, both almost finished, but needing editing. I think I’m going to focus on completing these others, but continue to write the new book when I have the inkling. After all, it’s all planned now, should be a doddle.

While it’ll take some time to discover whether my planning experiment is a success, the retreat experiment gets a big thumbs up. And judging by the way my creativity was flagging by the end of three days, it was the right length too. Unless next time we go somewhere exotic and allow ourselves to get distracted now and then…

_______________________________________________

Claire Watts writes and edits fiction and non-fiction 

for children and young adults. 

Her latest YA novel is How Do You Say GOOSEBERRY in French?

Ready ... Steady ...

I am feeling nervous. New job nervous. Like, you know you can do it, but will you be able to just go in there and do it right away, and what if you’re wrong, and actually you can’t do it.

This is clearly ridiculous.

I haven’t got a new job.

No one’s watching me. (Except YOU. Are YOU watching me?).

I’m about to do something I’ve done lots of times (but in a different way).

Today I am going to stay with my lovely writer friend Gill. We are planning to spend the next three days writing. There’ll be some walking and eating and talking too, of course, because otherwise we’ll go mad or get bored of writing (imagine!) and also what’s the point of being with another writer if you can’t spend ages moaning about how terribly difficult it is and cheering each other on.

I will not be writing.

I will be planning.

I used to write notes in fountain pen!

I’ve been dipping my toe in around the edge of this book for a long, long time. My first research notes are TWENTY years old. I’ve been pushing the idea around all that time, flicking it away when something else came into focus, then, more recently, letting it in, just at the edge of my vision, finding myself writing a snippet as an exercise in my writers’ group, wondering how the plot would work in my wakeful hours, letting my half-awake brain write the odd 500 words of it when I wasn’t sure what else to write for my daily writing target. I have a plan with some big holes in it, I have nine and a half thousand words that might possibly appear in the finished book and might just be playing around. I’ve been reading (possibly too much) about how to plan and structure a work of fiction – something I’ve never done before despite having written … several novels already (vagueness due to the fact that it’s hard to know what counts: two published, three works-in-progress which are full length but still need work and a flawed book I wrote for my children which could be salvageable). 

I could have started last week. I’ve had no work and no children to take up my time and my head-space. Instead I’ve been reading and reviewing books. I’ve been emptying my mind. 

I’m ready to take the plunge.

So this is the plan of what I am planning to plan (sorry, couldn’t resist).

1. First, I’m going to work on a single sheet plan outlining the movements of the plot. This will be the Master Plan. I’d like to get it complete before I start anything else, but I suspect there will be holes I can’t fill and I’ll just have to write things like ‘and then this gets resolved/more complicated’. The point is to have a skeleton on which to hang the more detailed planning.

2. I will write character notes. This is something I’ve only done once before and it definitely helped, particularly with the minor characters who seemed to spring more fully formed to the page, even when the details I’d worked out were never explicitly mentioned.

3. I will start a scene-by-scene plan of the book, filling in first the details from my Master Plan, adding the scenes I’ve already written if they seem relevant and working around these until I have an outline of the entire book. It is likely that this plan too will have bits that say ‘and then this gets resolved/gets more complicated’.

I’ll use a calendar to date each scene; this is the one bit of planning I’ve always done because I find it helps to ground the book in reality, and also, for me, it helps with pace. And I don’t end up with five day weekends or two Thursdays in a row.

4. I have no idea how long all this planning will take me. In an ideal world, I’ll come home on Tuesday morning with every scene mapped out so that my 500 words a day for the next few months will get the book written.

But, should I find that it’s Sunday night and I’ve finished all this planning, with a whole day left to play with, on Monday I will be attempting to write a Master Plan – or even a vague sketch – of three further books about my character. Chances are, I won’t get to this, but I do intend to do it soon as it seems only sensible to see the series in terms of a whole and make sure that I’ll be able to extend and reflect on things I’ve included in the first book later on.

Here goes!

_______________________________________________

Claire Watts writes and edits fiction and non-fiction 

for children and young adults. 

Her latest YA novel is How Do You Say GOOSEBERRY in French?

Sticking to the plan

Amongst writers of fiction, there are two distinct camps: those who plan a book down to the finest detail before they start (the plotters) and those who start with the first line of page one and fly by the seat of their pants until they see where it takes them (the pantsers).

Of course, not everyone fits into one category or the other, and, of the people I’ve discussed this question with, the majority come down at some point in the middle, although most seem more inclined to the plotter end than the pantser. At the very least, they are likely to have some idea of the beginning and end of the novel they’re working on, even if they are not entirely sure what is going to happen in the middle.

WHICH WAY TO GO?

The advantages of intense plotting before you start are obvious: if you have a careful plan, you will never be stuck wondering what to do with your characters next and you shouldn’t end up with a manuscript full of holes and inconsistencies. You can work in all that stuff writing courses and manuals talk about: narrative arc, point of no return, hero’s journey … You can make sure your subplot doesn’t take over and that you never put a gun on the mantelpiece and don’t fire it.

The disadvantages are just as clear: if it’s all mapped out before you put hand to keyboard, isn’t the actual writing going to be tedious writing-by-numbers? Certainly that’s how the arch-pantser sees it. For them, the joy of writing is waiting for the muse to strike, the penny to drop, the lightbulb to appear above their head.

POST-ITS AND GRAPHS

Have you seen those walls covered in post-its that some writers use to work out their plots? Those terrify me. What is on each of those tiny bits of paper? How do you remember if you’ve worked each one into your novel? And the graphs with the lines that build up and plummet and build up again. 

What does that mean? When I started using the trial version of Scrivener, the writing program, it just confused me. I need to make a page (card? panel?) for each character? And for each setting? I suppose it makes sense, but, I thought either it’s all there in my head, or else it’s not but it’ll come out when it’s needed, no need to spend an age working out what some minor character’s mother’s called, not if it’s not important.

The trouble with going for the plotter approach is that plotting is a lot like doing exam revision. You may know that once you do it, you’ll be able to achieve your best work. But there’s always something more exciting to do than revision, and people keep telling you so many different ways of going about your revision that you get confused and then you’re completely turned off the whole thing, and, you know, what the hell, it doesn’t matter that much, you’re clever, you’ll manage perfectly well without bothering.

JUMPING RIGHT IN

In my writing to date, I have generally started with a setting and an idea where I’m going, plus a few of the stops along the way, I might even have a couple of pages of planning. But it’s only when I’ve finished that I review how the plot has worked – or how it hasn’t. As I do my first edit, I make a spreadsheet of what happens in each chapter, what the timescale is, the setting, the word count and notes about what needs fixing. I suppose, in essence, it’s what serious plotters do before they start.

With my first book, I worked this way because I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, or whether I’d ever even finish the book. Now that I know a bit more – from talking and reading and thinking about writing as well as quite a few years of practice – I’m beginning to acknowledge that this is an approach that wastes a lot of time. As I write, I’m concentrating too much on where what I’m writing is going and not enough on the fine detail of the scene I’m currently working on. And when I reach the end, I have no easy way to judge whether what I’ve written really works. I rely instead on instinct, which is, I suspect, skewed by the fact that this is my new baby. Putting the manuscript away for a while works, but adds yet more time to the process and means I have to keep coming back to a previous story when my head’s already moved on to the next thing.

COMING ROUND

Recently I’ve been struggling with an unruly plot that seems to be taking far too many words to get to where I’m headed. I’m on the brink of finishing – I’ve written the end – but I know there’s something wrong with it. I feel unable to stop and take stock until I’m certain that I’ve supplied whatever it is that’s missing. I’m perfectly well aware that some of what I’m writing is going to have to go, but I can’t see a sensible way to pull out of the story without making it harder to sort out.

I’ve also been reading The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne and my dog-walk listening of choice is the Story Grid podcast. The Story Grid is a system for planning and editing your writing. It’s intense and precise and requires a lot of work beyond actually putting words on screen, both before you start and once you’ve finished. Gradually all that stuff about points-of-no-return and inciting incidents and rising and releasing of tension is coming into focus for me. It’s not that I didn’t understand those things before; I just thought they’d come naturally as I wrote, the same way spelling and punctuation do.

I was just starting to come round to the idea that serious plotting before I start to write is a good idea. I like to experiment with my writing method. (I may even write by hand one day – but probably not; imagine all the crossing out.) I’ve been asking all the writers I know about their writing methods, and one of them mentioned that she’d spent six weeks at the end of last year doing intense plotting. My first thought was, “Six weeks? That’s way too long. What a waste of writing time.” But then she told me how much quicker writing the actual book was when she’d done the plotting first. And not just quicker, but also more immersive. She started each writing session already deep in her characters’ world and didn’t leave it until she stopped.

That’s the thing that’s sold plotting to me: the idea that you can step so lightly into the world you’ve created.

So, I’m considering working out my next book to a scene-by-scene level before writing a word. I’m planning a series of four so I suppose I’ll have to give due consideration to what happens in the sequels too.

Though I have to admit, I haven’t been able to stop myself from writing a few scenes already...

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Claire Watts writes and edits fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults. Her latest YA novel is How Do You Say GOOSEBERRY in French? You can read the first chapter here.