Admitting that I wasn’t a pantser was the first step to embracing the inner planner. However, admitting that I had a problem was only the first step. The next thing to do was to figure out how to plan. A lifetime of pantsing fiction while following the instructions of my teachers for various academic writings didn’t really give me a good idea of how to outline fiction. I was pretty sure that the standard “outline” consisting of a hierarchy of Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numerals, etc. wasn’t going to work, but I had no idea of what would.
My first attempt to be a planner consisted of opening my notebook and trying to write, chapter by chapter, everything that was going to happen in the book. That worked wonderfully…until I got to about the two-thirds or three-quarters point and realized I had no idea what happened next. After a couple of these, I figured out that I wasn’t actually planning—I was just pantsing without writing any of the interesting parts. I was still just writing through, hoping I’d be able to figure out what happened next.
I got closer to success when someone—I wish I remembered who so that I could give credit where it’s due—introduced me to the Snowflake Method. This made sense to me: figure out the story in broad strokes, then go back and fill in the details. I did my best to follow that for the next few books I wrote—and I failed miserably again. The outlining process was taking multiple months, and I lost patience in it before I wanted to write the novel. So again, despite trying to get the inner planner working, I ended up with a sprawling mess, spending a dozen chapters on something that should have been a side plot at best, and no closer to getting anything finished.
I analyzed why I’d failed, and eventually I figured out that the Snowflake Method had too many steps, and steps that were too different from what I personally needed. The basic idea was sound: figure out the broader story, then figure out more details the farther into the process I go. The problem was that I lost sight of that goal in trying to write the story in exactly one sentence, exactly five sentences, writing a paragraph on each of the major characters, etc. I needed to go back to the basics and work my way through.
I experimented, and eventually I developed the process that created Red Lights on Silver Mountain Road. It goes roughly as follows:
- Write the full story in a page or two. This is the stage where all major questions need to be answered, i.e. who’s the killer, what’s his/her motivation, just what is the secret of the giant magic crystal McGuffin.
- Write the Table of Contents. Each chapter should have a name that tells me what the chapter needs to do in order to move the story forward. Note that the names here don’t have to be the ones that show up in the final novel or even necessarily a serious attempt at making them such (one book I amused myself by making all the preliminary chapter names lines out of Tom Petty songs). However, they need to offer some general guidance, making sure that I’m not totally lost when I get to Step 3.
- Write about a paragraph description for what happens in each chapter. This is the stage where all minor questions needs to be answered, i.e. how is the detective going to find the killer, what does the mysterious note left at the scene of the crime mean, how will the heroes break into the top-secret lab where the giant magic crystal McGuffin is kept.
- Write the freaking novel already.
So that’s it, a simple, 4-step process to write a novel. Easy-peasy. I can now write anything I want.
Or not. In my next post, I’ll get into a few places where things go off the rails.