Plotting a New Book

 

I’ve just begun the first draft of a new book. This one is women’s fiction about a writer who is burned out. No, it isn’t me, especially not the burnout part, although we do share the same writing philosophy and practices.

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the landscape is set out like a giant chess board and Alice has to figure out how to get across it to change from a pawn into a queen. That’s sort of how I look at setting out to write a book.

What follows is a reprint of my July 20. 2020 post. The murder mystery that’s referenced is my still unpublished COVID-19 project.

The Power of Flexibility

Writers are sometimes classified as either plotters or pantsers. Plotters have every twist and turn planned before they even start writing, while pantsers start with a germ of an idea and then sit down and write by the seat of their pants. Then there are the many writers, like me, who fall somewhere in between.

I start with an outline. I know the beginning and the ending and then pencil in each chapter. That’s sort of like deciding where to go on vacation and then choosing the route to take. Maybe we want to get there quickly, so we stick to the freeways. Or we decide to take the scenic route. Or maybe we want to see specific places that require us to go out of the way.

The outline is what gets me started, just as a trip itinerary does. But although the destination rarely changes, the route may.

As a trip planner, I know every stop I intend to make. Then one site takes less time than we expected so we add something else nearby. Or another site is so fascinating that we spend extra time there and may cut something else out. We may even decide to leave the freeway and wander along the scenic route or vice versa. To be honest, though, that doesn’t happen very often. My trip planning is more rigid than my writing outline.

As I write, new ideas pop into my mind. They often fit within the current structure, but that isn’t always the case. I’ve already added two unplanned chapters to the first draft of my murder mystery because I need them to round out my main POV character. I have also cut—or rather combined—several chapters after I realized that my secondary POV character wouldn’t be present for those events and would have to learn about them second-hand rather than by participating in them. Sometimes telling is necessary, but it takes less space than showing does.

If I didn’t start with an outline, I would soon get lost. But if I stuck to it rigidly, I would miss out on the scenes that pop up along the way.

Flexibility is key.

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The image at the top of this post is one of John Tenniel’s illustrations for the original 1872 edition of Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. It is in the public domain because of its age.