Hello again!
So let’s talk about my new writing process. First, a bit of writerly jargon, for those unfamiliar. Writers typically come in two basic flavors: “plotters” and “pantsers.” The plotters are people who create outlines, notes, etc. before actually beginning to write out their story or novel. Pantsers are so called because they write “by the seat of their pants.” They may or may not have a fairly solid idea what their story is going to be about, but they do little to no outlining before starting to type out prose.
Most of us identify as one or the other, but in practice we’re mostly all hybrids. I’ve always considered myself a potter. I’ve always done an outline, always known my idea going in. But I’ve come to realize there was still a lot of pantser in me.
My outlines would be very detailed for the first several chapters, then they’d be looser as things moved on, to be fleshed out later after I’d written the first chunk of the book. This isn’t an uncommon approach. SciFi Romance author Linnea Sinclair writes like this outlining a few chapters, writing, then outlining some more. (Or at least she did, at the time of the workshop where she said this. Can’t say she hasn’t changed her process since then, of course.)
I managed to finish some books this way, but it never worked great for me. And for a long time, I didn’t really know why. Then I realized/learned a few things, all of which will probably get their own posts later, so I won’t be going into detail about them here. But from those collective epiphanies, a new approach to my writing has emerged. I’m still in the middle of this process, so I’m not here to share a success story just yet. Rather, I’m inviting you along with me on the journey.
It began on New Year’s Day 2018. I always make a point of spending most of January 1st writing, so that I’m starting my year off doing something I want to do a lot of all year. That year, I’d decided it was time to get serious about producing some good, commercial, fiction so I could actually start making money with my writing. (I have another book published currently, that does have some sales, but it’s under a pen name I won’t be doing a whole lot under, and you can’t usually make real money without a decent number of titles, especially as a self-pub.)
I decided that rather than try yet again to force one of my ongoing projects into shape, I was going to start with something brand new. I’d recently read Story Engineering by Larry Brooks as well as a blog post series about antagonists by Kristin Lamb, which are the sources of the aforementioned epiphanies, and was ready to put my new discoveries into action.
I came up with a completely new idea, in a semi-new genre (Paranormal Romance rather than my usual Urban Fantasy.) I knew this was going to be a series, and I was determined for once not to be two-thirds of the way through writing a book without knowing how the hero was going to win, or who the real villain really was. I was all done with uncertainty.
So, I spent that whole day and the next several weeks figuring out the general arc of the entire series. Nine books. All at once.
And to be clear, I did not work out nine books in detail in a few weeks. I have a day job and a long commute. My writing time is limited; this is not the blog of a full time writer here. But in just a few weeks, I had the general idea down. I knew how many books I was looking at, who my series-arc villain was, what his goal and plans were.
Once I had that worked out, I started working out individual books. Since these are PR, each book, in addition to being part of the overall series arc, focuses on a particular pair of characters. Meaning I had to come up with multiple protagonist pairs. Each time I came up with the pairing for the next book, I worked them into the overall and all the book ideas expanded and deepened. It was the most exciting thing ever, watching this world flesh out in my mind and in my notes bit by bit.
Eventually, I had a fairly decent synopsis worked out for eight of the nine books in the series. I knew how things were going to end, but the book-level plot details of book 9 were going to take a bit longer. But 1-8 I had solid plots and definite main characters.
My next step, I’ve already discovered, was a waste of time that I won’t be doing again. I started going through, book by book, creating a framework in Scrivener, doing a card for each scene, grouped into folders for each chapter. (For the non-writers: Scrivener is a super useful writing software. Newbies and bestselling authors both swear by it.) That was a waste, it turns out, because I still wasn’t clear enough on my plot specifics for that. I did Scrivener frameworks for books 1 through 3 and about half of 4 before October arrived and it was time to get ready for NaNo WriMo.
NaNo was also a mistake. I haven’t always won, but I haven’t sat out NaNo since I first participated in… 2006, I think? But book one was not ready yet, and I wasted a good chunk of time writing 30k words that all needed redone.
During October, though, I got started on the heart of my new process, what I’m currently calling my “deep scene outline.” I don’t like this name, and I’m hoping to come up something better soon, but it’s what I’m rolling with for now. What this really is is a detailed synopsis of every scene in the book, beginning to end. I’m calling it an “outline,” but it’s so much more than that.
Each scene gets its own page, some more than one page. In fact, in the first draft (yes, multiple drafts of something called an “outline”) almost every scene had at least 2 pages. Each scene has a header with the scene number and a title (these scene titles will not appear in the book; they’re just for me.) Under the header is a template section with several things for me to fill in, including things I wanted to be sure I didn’t get carried away and forget to include. I made myself declare what purpose the scene served in terms of plot information, as well was what conflict/tension drove the scene. Forcing myself to identify this information at this stage really helped to weed out weak, unnecessary scenes, rambling passages, and infodumps.
I didn’t get through the whole first draft of the DSO during October 2017, so I had to start doing my NaNo writing based on what I had so far. This was a lot of why it didn’t work. Before the end of November, I realized I needed to quit writing and resume work on the DSO, and finished the first pass.
I’d remembered advice from Larry Brooks in Story Engineering, that it’s easier to revise an outline than a 400 page novel. To be fair, he wasn’t referring to a 130 page synopsis pretending to be an outline, but the advice still works. I printed out the DSO and edited that thing the same way I would a first draft of a book manuscript. I marked it up with colored pens, highlighters, and Post Its. I rearranged scenes, added new info, even drew big red X’s through more than one whole scene.
One of the most useful, and most fun, things I did was to assign my orange highlighter to the category of “clue.” Being able to go back through, scene by scene, and make notes of where to add hints, clues, and important continuity markers delighted my nerdy little heart soooo much. I literally wrote “mwahaha” into my DSO more than once! Even once the book is finished, I can’t show this outline to anyone until the entire series is finished, because there are literally spoilers for every other book in this thing, highlighted in lovely orange.
Once I was done marking the outline up, I created a new Word doc and distilled it all down into a working version. I felt I was now OK to leave out listing the plot info and conflict notes, since I’d confirmed they were present. I left the number and title header, then just a synopsis with “beginning” “middle” and “end” headers. Most scenes I managed to get down to one page. I used my onscreen highlighters and paint bucket to include several of the important highlight colors, especially the orange!
And now, I’m back to writing the manuscript for book one. I have one more scene of the mess I created during NaNo WriMo to redo, then I’ll be back to writing from scratch based on the DSO. It’s a slower process than just writing beginning to end then fixing it later. And yes, I’m doing some editing as I go, which writers will know is usually a big no-no for writers.
And really, I would never recommend what I’m doing to a newer writer. If you haven’t finished a novel before, ideally multiple novels, you definitely should not try using a process that gives you an excuse to stop and edit before moving on. That is the biggest reason people fail to finish books they start trying to write.
But I know I can finish a book now. This new process, I hope, will accomplish two things for me: First, it guarantees I know where things are going, so I don’t meander, and so I don’t waste thousands and thousands of words writing plot tangents that wind up having to be completely eliminated. And second, it separates what I’ve come to realize are two very different components of the writing process: creating the story, and telling it. I spent a very long time creating both the story of this first book as well as the overall, basic story for the full series of nine books. Now, I just have *tell* the story I’ve created.
Moving on from here, I plan to do a DSO for each book before writing it. I’ll also be expanding/editing/updating my notes and basic synopsis for all the other books as I flesh out each before writing. I spent a full year getting the basics of the series down, which I won’t lie, felt like spending an entire year *not writing.* But I know I *was* writing. And really, when you break down January through September that I spent working out the overall series, that’s one month per book. One month to conceive the basic synopsis of a complete novel is actually pretty fast for someone with an average of 2 hours or less per day to write.
So that’s my new thing. A completely planned-out series, with a detailed scene-by-scene synopsis before writing each individual book. I’m currently on scene 14 of book one, and will continue to share how things are going.
Oh, and after almost a year and a half with this series, I know my characters’ names and backstories, I know the basic plot of every book, the details of my world, my magick systems etc. But you know what I still don’t have? Like, *at all*?
Titles.
I have *ideas* for a few, namely books 2, 5, and 8. That’s it, and until I know if I’m using a standard naming convention even those three are merely tentative. And notice book ONE isn’t on that list. Doesn’t matter how much planning and work you do—titles are HARD lol!
Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going. Thanks for reading!
~Sara