Plotting

There are two types of writers: pantsers and plotters. Pantsers write by the seat of their pants not knowing what comes next. Plotters plan the story out ahead of time. Some people, like me, use a combination of the two. For Messengers I did quite a lot of pantsing, although I brainstormed a bunch of scenes ahead of time that I thought would be cool and did a good amount of thinking through scenes ahead of time, especially dialogue. I didn't always know exactly what came next at the paragraph level, but I always had something to aim for. I was never lost or suffering from writer's block. I knew the ending ahead of time and tried to point everything toward that. The B'vellah War series is more plotted. Avatars of Espionage is even more plotted.

This week I've been working on plotting. I'm still doing the French thing and am still trying to find a balance between time for that and writing time. Nevertheless, I was able to put some quality time into the writing front. As part of becoming more professional, I'm trying to develop a plot outline for the next bit of writing and get better at plotting in general. I've been brainstorming cool scenes and trying to fit them into a coherent, flowing narrative. I don't mind plotting the overall story, but I tend to pants characters. I'll have an idea of who the character is up front and explore the person through writing the story to really learn the character. In Messengers, I developed the characters ahead of time and added personal details as the story went along. Later, I had to go back and flesh out the beginning characterizations some.

The problem with pantsing is that it takes, I've read, something like four(?) times as much work as plotting. I don't like the sound of that, and I know how much revision I had to do with Messengers and and how much less it took for Avatars. I had to make multiple passes through Messengers, concentrating on a specific thing for each pass. I've been trying to get away from that. I added a lot of cool things in revision, but it takes forever. I'd rather work it out ahead of time.

I did some writing this week but quickly discovered I did not do enough plotting. I'm thinking about plotting out the middle grade trilogy as practice and save the writing of it as a future project. Middle grade books are very short. I might do 35k maximum words instead of the minimum 80k for SF or F. A plot outline would be fairly short in comparison to the word count. I need some practice, but I don't want to get bogged down by it or spend an excessive amount of time on it.

It's not very exciting, but that's where things were this week. The big roadblock was I got bitten three times by what had to be a spider. I have two big red blotches on my stomach and a third smaller one in a rough line going up. By the end of the day when it's time to write, I've been super tired. They're getting better though and shrinking. I'm guessing a spider was under the edge of the bathroom sink and crawled onto me while I was brushing my teeth.

Have a great weekend.