McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Where to Start; Plot, Characters, or Setting?

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Aliased:
Hey Jim Butcher Forum members, my name is James, I'm about to graduate from high school and I like reading books; lots of books.  My favorite series are probably The Dresden Files, The Mercedes Thompson Series, Discworld (Watch, and Death cycles,) and the Kitty Norville Series.  Not necasarilly in that order because truthfully my favorite author at any given time, assuming I enjoyed his/her books, can best be summarized as the one whose books I most recently read/reread; right now it's Jim because I'm freshening up on the series in anticipation of Ghost Story.

Recently, while pondering what I want to be when I grow up, I started wondering if I would enjoy writing fiction (or if I would even be any good at it, since creative writing is something I have never considering trying before.)  So now I have some questions you have probably all seen and answered a million times before here's the first one I can think of:

Where do you recommend I begin writing...do I begin by
A) fleshing out a bunch of characters and filling in a story around them
B) coming up with a plot for a story and then creating characters that fit, or
C) do I begin by imagining all the details of the world my story takes place and my characters live in (for instance, let's say I want to write a gritty first person narrative about a wizard/private investigator with a penchant for getting in over his head, did I first imagine what rules and laws govern the world and what creatures inhabit it, and then create the character or the story.)

Please don't tell me it's some terribly complicated combination of the three all at once because while that might work for some people, and especially experienced writers, I need somewhere to start.

As an aside, having never written creatively before I'm sure I don't know much about creating characters; does anyone have a file, a website, or a list of important questions I should answer or keep in mind when creating them?  I saw a link to some character sheets on another website for instance, you filled in the characters favorite color, food, height, stuff like that; but because you couldn't save the document, it had to be printed, it was inconvenient for my current computer set up (read; I own no printer.)

*Edit* Found information on character sheets easily on Google, I just hadn't been searching for it using the right words.

Snowleopard:
Hi James and welcome to the forum.
As for starting writing - truthfully it varies from writer to writer.
It's gonna be whatever works best for you.

Now when I write, I get an idea and let it roll around in the back of my head for awhile and then
finally I'll start putting it down on paper, so to speak.
I don't tend to outline plot or flesh out the characters, their world and/or universe - that sorta happens on the fly.
To be truthful, most of my stories happen in a universe that I've already created so I know a lot about it.
I write/create the characters moving/reacting to their world/situation.
Mind you now, this is how I work - it does NOT mean that you have to work that way or even should.
I often get bogged down in the middle of my stories because I haven't outlined or fleshed out the whole plot. 
I know where I'm starting from and where I want to end up but I'm sometimes foggy on the road I need to take.
I hope that's been of some assistance.

Haru:
Something that has helped me to get started is to start with really really (really) small steps. I assume you have at least a few scenes in your head, that would suit well into a story. Forget the story, write that scene, and only that scene. For example I had a scene in mind a few years back, where 2 people fall out of some sort of portal in slow motion, and the phrase "And then reality exploded". I didn't know what had happened, where they came from or anything, I just wrote about that scene, and when I was finished, I had written it so that I wanted to know what the heck happened and where they where.
Sort of like when you are out of shape and you want to start jogging, people will tell you to start slow, walk the first few times to get your body adjusted to the new physical stress. This is kind of the same, start flexing your creative writing muscles, the more you write, the more you will be able to write.

As for character sheets, I think the way characters are created in the Dresden Files RPG is perfect for stories, so you might want to check that out.

There was also Jim's livejournal (though it is more in a zombie state, lately), where he describes some excellent tips. I'll see if I can find the link.

Aliased:
Three things I have noted in regards to Jim's livejournal;

It hasn't been updated in years.

For some reason some of the posts seem to be made by people who don't like Jim's writing; I'm not familiar with the workings of Livejournal, maybe I'm reading it wrong?  It almost seems like the comments are given just as much visual weight as the owners posts, making it impossible to distinguish between the two at a glance.

It has some valuable information in there somewhere, one of these days I'm going to read through the whole mess to see if I can find it.

OZ:
As has already been written there is not a single right or wrong answer to this. It's important to have some idea what story you want to tell. If you were telling a friend about the story would you start out by telling him or her about the characters and then tell what happened to them or would you start out by telling them the story and fill them in about the characters when necessary? There are many useful threads in this Author Craft section of the Forum. I find this one to be particularly useful:  http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,15083.0.html.

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