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Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Out of the Mist?


Among authors, there are plotters, the people who know everything that is going to happen and their characters follow the outline. Pantsers, who as you might have guessed, have no idea what's going to happen and write by the seat of their pants. And a combination of the two types. Plantsers?

I'm kind of a hybrid, although more on the pantser side of the spectrum. From time to time, I make an endeavor to try being more plotty--after all, if I'm already a mix, why can't I change the percentages of said blend? This is the story of my latest attempt.

I'm a slow writer. Part of the reason I'm slow is that I work full time and have an elderly parent living with me. Another part of the reason is that I usually only have a general idea what's going to happen in the story and I get stuck trying to figure out what is going to happen next. I might even write part of the scene before realizing it's not interesting enough for a book.

I decided to see if I can become more of a plotter so that I'm not lost in the woods, trying to find the next scene. I began by watching some YouTube videos and then I went and bought some ebooks. I also discovered that I already owned some of the ebooks I planned to purchase. They were buried deep in my Kindle app. Oops! I also found I owned some of the books in paperback already. I had a better memory of these, though, since they're in my office.

And I began reading. I bought index cards. I made notes on index cards that I will be throwing away because I didn't understand the system when I filled them in. I wrote more cards, discovered I needed to cut two chapters (sobs) because my characters had gone on strike. When that happens, it's almost always because I wrote something they would not do. Griff insisted that he would never do what I had him doing. I'm hoping I can salvage one of the scenes with a rewrite, but yeah. More index cards to toss.

But it also kind of underlined the reason why I want to be more plotty--if I could have figured out before I wrote those two chapters that they weren't right, I could have saved myself a lot of time. Including the time it took me to figure out why I was stuck.

I don't know if plotting will take hold in my brain any better this time than it has the other times I've tried to learn it, but we'll see. I did find cute little carrying cases for my index cards! They even have little dividers I could label Act 1, Act 2a, Act 2b, Act 3, and Discard.