McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
How do YOU plan your stories?
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: meg_evonne on July 22, 2011, 05:09:04 PM ---Author Tim Powers suggests you research until you have twenty too-cool-ideas to not use. If you've got a premise worth gold, research with twenty incredible things to use, characters you've developed that you know won't bore you after two years of working with them, minimum? Then I start Jim's big hairy plot arc with color stickies for subplots.
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Tim Powers is out on one end of the range of processes, I think; I've read him talking about his process in Locus, and IIRC he plans a story down to exactly who says what in which conversation before writing it.
It's probably worth noting that Steven Brust writes entirely as he goes along, with no advance planning at all, and relies on his subconscious to resolve things for him. (Even things he threw in specifically to test its facilility for doing that, like the goat in Cowboy Feng's.) When he gets stuck he just writes the characters meandering about moaning about being stuck.
Both of these extremes appear to have led to successful and critically acclaimed writing.
--- Quote ---I used to fly with only mental background, but the agony of getting 1/2 way done (or worse yet complete) and realizing that your premise is so over used that not an agent would read past your opening paragraph of your query? Yeah, not going to do that anymore. Same with the 'voices' of the characters.
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I use a single notes file, which tends to start off with a couple of key points per chapter and to expand to five or six before I get the chapter written. Withe the Book I Want To Be Writing Now, the setting is large enough that I am using more background notes files as well.
--- Quote ---There is a short cut for me, I think, which is working from the villain's POV--so I know intimately what s/he is doing if all went according to plan. Then I add in the protagonist, where the villain is bumped off plan, where the villain bumps the protagonist off plan.
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Cool.
I think I tend to be bound so tightly to the POV of the person/people from whom I am writing that I can't do that; if I am plausibly to do someone only just noticing what's happened and not knowing what the villain is up to it's easier to get into that headspace if I do not myself at that point know the precise details of what the villain is up to.
Nickeris86:
--- Quote from: teamlash on July 22, 2011, 04:13:10 PM ---Oh gosh, I wish I could do that!
My brain is about as disorganised as Harrys' lab though, so I have to have an outline.
How do you hold everything together in your head? :)
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i don't use mine for anything else so i store random ideas in it.
Kali:
Hold all *what* together? ;D Suggesting that I have something to hold together is the equivalent of suggesting I have a plan. Or a plot. I rarely do.
I start out with a cool idea, go to another cool idea, and another cool idea, and so on. Somewhere along the line I start to try to tie my cool ideas together. This is usually where things derail and get difficult, then I have to go back and plant seeds or kill entire scenes. Then I keep going to the next cool idea. Then I decide I should probably think up an ending somewhere around here. Then I make up an ending, and realize I have to go back and plant more seeds and rework scenes. Then I write the ending. Then I go back and really polish to try and make all the seed-planting and scene-changing as invisible as possible.
I'm not saying it's the easy way. I'm not saying it's the hard way. I'm just saying, that's how I work.
Alilisa:
I take a tape recorder with me, when something comes to me, I just tape it and then go from there, that way I never lose any ideas I may come up with.
1eyedjack:
Pondering, a tremendous amount of pondering. I like to think of it like assembling a bicycle in my brain. It only works if you put it together one way, and I can put it down and come back to it later in my head. I'll write down names and locations, subplot points, as well as different scenes but most of that is simply bullet points that I use as prompting while I play things out in my head. I like to put characters in scenes that may or may not be canonical, but still reveal something about them if only to me. I guess I could say that I like to build characters and let the characters build the story for me but that isn't entirely true. However, I do like to get an iron tight grip on characters before I ever knuckle down on the story. Tabletop games and my theatrical background are to blame for that, but it works for me so hey, no worries.
It isn't a matter of a brain being disorganized. It is about focusing on a scene and logical progression. Believe me I'm not organized about it in my head but I play a scene back over and over and over until I know it backwards and forwards. From there, I know what the next move is and I organize accordingly based on what is boring or not. Then I go and see if I can find the right words to express it.
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