Getting The Little Things Right

Hi Guys,

This time I thought I'd turn my attention to one of the problems that faces all writers, but especially pantsters like myself. Getting the details right. So here I'm talking about the things that in film and tv become known as continuity errors, where for example the hero gets in an overturned yellow sports car with damage in its side and drives away in an unblemished one – Commando. It's also about the issue of major plot holes and nonsensical plots. In Powers for example one of the anti-heroes forces another to help him in a complex prison break to murder a common enemy, simply because there is a “drainer” in it that could rob him of his teleportation ability. Problem is, all he really needed was a pump action shotgun and a balaclava. Teleport in, shoot his enemy in the head, shoot the machine and jump away. Simplicity itself.

These mistakes occur in writing as well as film and television. Sometimes they can be amusing, and occasionally they can completely ruin a book. But whichever they are, they shouldn't be there.

So how do we stop them? Or rather – how do I stop them? You will all have your own ideas as writers.

There are actually two approaches to preventing them from happening. Each approach is based on the style of writer you are. For plotters – those who like to plan out their books in advance of writing them – their approach actually protects them. Not perfectly. But it's hard to write in a plot hole when the plot is already laid out in detail with all the key developments written down in front of them. For plotters the best approach is simply to up their plotting so that their plots, time lines, world builds and character bio's etc, are written down in meticulous detail. A simple fix.

But for those like me who simply like to wade into writing the book without doing anything like that – pantsters – the fix is not quite so simple. For us we generally look at these issues as problems that we get around by constantly rewriting and editing our books as we write, and by being utterly focused on our work. But this isn't always enough.

So speaking purely for myself, I use a second approach. I write out the plot, time line, world build, character bio's, beastiary etc in a second document at the same time as I write the story. And as I write the story I have this second file open beside it. Then as I write I constantly update the data file. So for example for The Wolves of War, I had the story file Wolves in which I was working, and the data file WolvesData both open on my screen at the same time, and I simply swapped between the two as I wrote.

Sounds like a simple fix? It is. And it will save you a thousand headaches, and a thousand questions from beta readers, critics and readers as they hopefully enjoy your work. But I want to extend this a little to show just how invaluable this approach is in your writing for a pantster like me.

To return to Wolves for a bit which is obviously freshest in my memory, I'm going to look at just a couple of places this approach helped me immensely. I'll start with travelling.

Wolves is a traditional epic fantasy, and like many in the genre it involves the characters travelling large distances periodically. As the writer of course, I want for that travel to be realistic. To fit with the distances involved, the terrain crossed, and the means of travel. And I want to synch everything up with the plot so I don't have unreasonable time gaps where people are either not doing anything for excessive and inexplicable lengths of time while other characters are advancing the story, or else, rushing impossibly fast to do things so it all fits together in a logical story arc.

So to do this I include in my data file, two vital sections – the map and the time line.

The map is actually not a map for two very simple reasons. The first is that I can't actually draw a straight line even with a ruler. And the second is that my data file like all my writing is done in an older version of Word which doesn't handle graphics well. So instead my map is actually a series of locations, towns, cities, realms, and their distances / compass directions from another key location. And that actually works better for me than a map would since the distance and the means of travel give me the time taken to get from point A to B. And that in turn gives me a couple of notes to add to my time line as I write. The day the journey began and the day it ends.

In practise this becomes a straight forward approach. First I have the start point of the journey set out and a distance. So say my hero Briagh sets out for the fae realm on foot and carrying a large pack on Day Twenty One. His journey is a hundred and twenty leagues – three hundred and sixty miles. And the terrain is snow covered and flat. I simply estimate how far he can travel in a day under these conditions, and make an estimated time of twenty four days which means he arrives on Day Forty Five.

Now here's where the time line becomes so valuable. Because while Briagh is busy travelling my other main hero {anti-hero?} Elan is busy with her own story arc – arguing with the Court, escaping the city and giving chase for the second time. The time line allows me to place her story, chapter by chapter, at the exact right points in the story so that she can then arrive in the fae realm and start hunting down Briagh at the right time for him to have done what he needed to.

Another section included in my data file is the characters. Now here I don't just include the basic details like name, gender, race etc. I also include a minor biography for the important characters. Who is this man? What are his values? What does he care about? It doesn't have to be much. But it does have to be there. Because in any situation who a person is will determine how he will respond. So in Wolves, Briagh was a thief and a morph. A man whose entire life was based around running and hiding. Not trusting others with his secrets. Fearing exposure. So thrown into a new environment where his secret is known – how is he going to react? The bio is there as my guide to answering those questions, and it like the time line and the plot is being constantly added to as I write the story. {This of course is especially vital when as a pantster I tend to wander between writing different books at the same time and often don't write anything on the same book for days or months.}

Normally I include a beastiary in my data file – for a couple of reasons. The first is that I want a consistent set of creatures in my work that relate to my world. Is my world based on ancient Greek / Roman / Babylonian mythology? If so then I want it to include creatures from those mythologies like hell hounds, cerberi, minotaurs and not those of other mythologies. Similarly I need to nail down the characteristics and abilities of those beasts so that I don't have them doing things that they can't or wouldn't do. For example if a manticore is an ambush predator operating from its den in the forest depths, I don't want it to suddenly be out chasing down its prey across the savanna.

Other sections I usually include are the gods and religions of the world – you never know when you need a good curse or a priest to tell your characters about right and wrong. Likewise I add a language section – terms I use through the book. So in Wolves I took a number of terms from middle English and scattered them throughout the work, simply to keep the steam punk feel of the book alive. {This can be fascinating and fun research by the way, and you can learn a lot. For example in writing the book I discovered the term 'rakefire' which is essentially an over-stayer in an inn who refuses to pay for his lodgings and needs to be booted out in favour of paying guests.}

And last but by no means least I add a comments section. This I cannot stress the importance of strongly enough for pantsters and probably plotters to. This is simply a section where as I'm writing the book I have a random thought eg 'explain the magic of scrying somewhere in book'. This matters because obviously I as the writer know what scrying is and how it works in the book, so as I reread and edit it makes perfect sense to me. But if that isn't in the book somewhere, my readers may be left scratching their heads wondering what's happening.

So to those of you who like to write in the manner I do – by the seat of your pants – this is the approach I use, and I would commend it to you.

Here's hoping you have a great new year ahead.

 

Cheers, Greg.

Plotting, Pantsting And Pulling Out Your Hair!

 

Hi Guys,

 

 

 

Haven't posted a lot for a while. I've been busy writing and editing and haven't had a lot of spare time. But now that I have a little, I thought I'd share with you one of the thoughts that's been on my mind lately. It's about time I suppose.

This time it's about the ever present debate in writing circles – should you plot or write by the seat of your pants? There are probably, as everyone who's in this game will know, as many opinions as there are writers. And so many of them are strongly held and even more powerfully argued.

Those who are plotters will argue that working to an outline gives them the chance to pull a coherent book together right from the start. It saves them time and effort and focuses them on a target allowing them to be more efficient. Pantsters on the other hand will talk about creative freedom and being unable to stick to an outline anyway. And then there are the guys in the middle who will do some plotting and some free writing and hopefully pull together a story that way.

My thought in this post is not to support either side. Nor to hold some place in the middle ground. But rather to look at the entire argument in a different way. It may not actually be a choice at all. As a writer you should write the way that works best for you.

To begin with I suppose I should start by laying my cards on the table. I'm as close to a pure pantster as any writer can be. I never plot. I don't work to an outline. And when I write I not only don't know where the books going to end I usually don't know where the chapter's going to end. My approach to writing is simple. I start with a character or a scene or an idea and I write it. Then I stretch it a bit by asking questions. Who is this man? Why is he doing what he's doing? What sort of world is this? And little by little what started out as a wisp of an idea becomes a story and in time if I'm lucky, a completed novel.

That's not to say that this is the right way to do it. Just that it's my way. And as a writer I pay a heavy price for this approach. Not having any idea of where a story is going to go means that very often it goes nowhere. So I have well over a hundred partially completed novels sitting on my computer now which have basically run out of legs. Some of them are all but complete but I simply don't know how to complete them. Others are simply fascinating ideas that I explored, and may one day take further. But all of them share one thing in common. They all took a lot of effort to write and there is no novel to show for that effort.

This is a problem. Pantsting comes with some heavy prices for an author. As an author if I want to make more money I should stick to one genre like epic fantasy and write series etc. But how can I stick to one genre when I don't know even what world my idea comes from when I start writing it? And how can I write a series say when I wrote the original novel and completed it without any thought that there should be any more. I had a story, I wrote it, and that was all there was!

So that's my world as a pantster. A sort of organised chaos that sometimes comes up with a novel and occasionally even an original one. But with a lot of dry runs and misfires along the way. And sometimes, like every other writer out there, I think to myself – maybe there's a better way.

Then about a month ago I came up with a story idea that I really liked and threw myself into it. The book, though I doubt it'll ever be finished, was called Three Wishes, and was in essence a cautionary tale about wishes and having them come true. And like a mad man I quickly started working out what those wishes should be and how they should go horribly wrong while being granted exactly as asked for. And then at some point I expanded the idea to have two antagonists both having three wishes granted by the same agency, both having them fulfilled exactly as requested, and having them go horribly wrong, and yet at the same time have each antagonists wish the perfect foil to the others wish. In short they cancel each other out.

Yeah I know, sounds complicated. And it is. And it became more so when I had to formulate the three – or actually seven as it became – wishes so that each and every one of them perfectly countered another so that in turn everything went horribly wrong for both antagonists, yet the story would somehow end up in a positive place.

That's where the plotting versus pantsting thing comes in. As a pantster, knowing all the places where pantsting lets me down, and finally having a logical construct to hang a novel on, I thought it was time to finally embrace the dark art of plotting.

So I went out, read all the books and advice columns on plotting – there are a surprising number of them – and ultimately set out to craft a plot around my two antagonists and their wishes. Then with everything nailed down and a twenty seven chapter book outlined, I began writing.

That as you can probably guess is where the pain began.

Within the first chapter I went off plot – and not just a little bit. We're not just talking character outlines and city names here. By the end of the first chapter I'd swapped genres, shifting from an urban fantasy to an epic fantasy, and also changed the relationship between the two antagonists as well as throwing in a third character with her own wish to confound things and a religion.

But undeterred because I knew that plotting was the way to go to advance my craft, I went back to the drawing board (lap top) and replotted the entire novel based on the new first chapter. After all I figured, most plotters say that there's room for a few changes here and there. And most of the guides talk about having a looser outline that allows for minor changes here and there. I'm not sure though that I can do minor when it comes to changes!

Unfortunately none of those guides had allowed for chapter two where it became obvious to me that in fact I'd got the entire thrust of the story wrong, and that the two antagonists while the ones making the wishes weren't the ones driving them. There was in fact another player behind the scenes pulling their strings as well as granting them their wishes – the Red God.

So back to the lap top and re-plot an entire novel based on this new understanding, then start on chapter three. Alas chapter three was the one where the king's daughter turned up unexpectedly and completely changed directions. In a heartbeat she went from being the loving daughter who was unable to wed the prince because her golden dowry and turned to lead, to the daughter forced to marry the prince of a rival kingdom because the entire treasury's gold supply had turned to lead. It was just a tiny change but it changed the entire story necessitating yet another complete re-plotting of the book.

Then came chapter four where – you guessed it – more shit happened.

And that brings me to where I am now, a month later and ten chapters wiser. And what's the one piece of wisdom I've learned? I can't plot! Or rather I can sketch out a brilliant plot, outline it to twenty decimal places, and make it perfect – but I just can't damn well write to it.

So far from making me a more efficient writer and helping to weave together a plot perfect story, plotting has slowed me down immensely and contributed precisely nothing to my writing. Because what's the point of having a plot if you can't stick to it? And especially when every little change I make as I write, means I have to completely rewrite the plot? It may be a brilliant approach for many writers. It may overcome many of the problems inherent for pantsters. But it's absolutely useless for me.

Which is really my point for other writers entering into this fray. And it's not to say that plotting is bad and pantsting is the way to go. You're all plotters or a pantsters or some hybrid creatures in between. And that's fine. As long as you've found what works for you.

My point is that before you start thinking of how wonderful it would be to either start plotting more or free writing more, and before you waste your time and money on the various writing guides, you take a step back and think about whether there's any point in trying to change. Because despite all the arguments about how each side is so much better than the other from whatever perspective, the truth is that the one that is best for you is the one you're most comfortable with. Trying to change how you write may well be the biggest, most frustrating waste of time and effort you could ever engage in. In fact you may well end up like me – pulling your hair out clump by clump!

So this is my new golden rule of writing. There is no right way to write.

 

Cheers, Greg.