I have spent the past month giving you a peek inside my thoughts around how I like to approach my writing process. The way I build characters, the way I build my worlds, and how I piece together my plot are all rooted in the same processes, looking back at what built them and what they are trying to become. Your characters, your world, and your plot should not be separate from each other, they should be of the same tightly wound thread. The way I write about these topics can give you the false impression that I have every detail planned out. Nothing could be further from the truth, I like to flex my imagination as I write. I like to discover new bits of lore and intrigue as I write and to do that I can’t be bound by an outline.
Since I spend a fair bit of time building my characters and world before I sit down to write, you would think that I have everyone, and everything already figured out. All that work I put into character building gives me a name and face but only the barest hints of a personality. The world-building gives me cities and structures but not communities that live in them. It’s like drawing a picture, I have the outlines, but the colors are not filled in. This is how I like things, finding my characters’ voices in dialog, exploring my worlds through my character’s eyes, and uncovering the tone of the story as it unfolds before me. I have learned that I don’t need to know every single little thing in my worlds, even Tolkien, one of our most celebrated world builders, didn’t know everything about his world. These grand mysteries are fun to find (so long as they don’t break the world) and are one of the things I like most about my writing process.
It is said there are two types of writers the Planners and the Pantsers. Planners have an outline; every scene, every story beat they need to hit, ring notebooks full of world-building. I feel like this approach takes the joy out of the process for me. I have tried to have detailed outlines but by the time I am done writing them I am uninspired and not really excited to sit down and write the story out. Pantsers are on the opposite end, they have a desire to tell a good story and that’s about it. When I did my second WriMo novel, I thought I could Pants it. The project failed ten days into WriMo. Clearly, I need to find a different way to write, a third way. I like to think of myself as a bit of a hybrid between a Pantser and a Planner (honestly I think most writers are). I start with a loose structure to guide my writing but that also affords me the freedom to explore wherever my imagination takes me. This gives the story flexibility I need to feel engaged in the writing process but also gives me enough structure to maintain a well-paced and tightly crafted narrative.
I have learned that I need to have a minimum of five things before I sit down to write. I have the main character, a basic world sketch, a beginning scene, a midpoint, and an idea of how I want the ending to play out. These five things are as far as I can scale back things before I lose control of the story threads. Luckily, I will often have developed more characters, more places in the world and more story beats than just those five core ideas. This changes for each of the projects I create, sometimes I will need a better handle on the world or the story, different books will require a different focus. For Facet, I have to keep track of where characters are in relation to the main threat, and since this is a fairly exploratory story, I have needed to develop the mythos and locations a bit more than usual.
There is no one way to write a story, you can be a Pantser, a Planner, or something in between. Each writer will have their own way of approaching and constructing a story. What matters is not how you put the pieces together, but actually sitting down to write! If you have a story you want to write, do it. I have now written several manuscripts, and I can tell you that my methodology is customized to me. Don’t sweat the small stuff, just write!