Everyone should have a plan
Mr Stuart, my good friend and one time literary collaborator, has pre-empted my intended blog on planning by spilling the beans on how he manages the creative process. It seems only fair that I do the same now, although when I mentioned planning in my last blog it was in the context of permission to build a house, rather than the arcana of constructing plot and birthing characters.
Nevertheless, since all I know about the British planning system is a: supremely boring; and b: that it is likely to turn me prematurely grey (or gray if you're in America), and since I haven't actually embarked on any plans as such (at least not beyond the scribbles on bits of paper depicting palaces I could never afford to build), I will instead regale you both with my thoughts on planning novels.
I have to date written six of the things - none yet having been read by anyone beyond my immediate circle of friends and family. You'd think I'd know better by now but I don't. I've also written a travel book, but the less said about that the better.
The first three had no plan at all when I started on them, beyond a vague idea of a plot and some lead characters. Each of them had to undergo major structural rewriting to weed out all the problems that occurred, so for the fourth book I thought I would plan.
I have endless reams of paper scrawled across in my illegible handwriting. Ideas, characters, descriptions of worlds and societies. Sometimes I think better whilst typing, so there are innumerable files on my computer full of useless nonsense. In the end I had a plot all nicely boiled down into about eighty sections where 'something happened'. The whole seemed to build up nicely into a climactic resolution that nevertheless left the door wide open for a sequel, or even a series. Then I started to write.
Within a dozen pages a completely new character forced herself into the narrative and swept the hero protagonist off his feet. Her father was a minor player, whose death early on was an important turning point. She popped into my head as an easy way of making his character more interesting for the short time it was in the book. She met up with the hero and one thing lead to another. The remaining seventy-eight sections had to be revised, bodged, hacked and mangled together to make room for her. I was far too lazy to go back and start the whole planning process over again.
There is a point to this rambling, I'm sure. I may even get to it one day. I have written in a number of genres - SF, fantasy, magical realism (whatever that is). I've written comic scripts about alien invasions and an amusing tale about an Edinburgh man on a gruesome mission to rid the world of the evil that is children (along with Mr Stuart, who drew the pictures and thrashed out the subtler plot points with me over many, many pints of beer. Those were the days). I've even written a travel book about a trip I went on with some friends, bicycling around the north of Scotland. For all these and more, see the DevilDog Website. All these stories are character driven. They start with the characters and then I just see where they go.
Now, those of you who are fans of crime fiction will instantly see the folly in this approach. Especially if your characters are all, deep down, decent honest people who would really just like to get on with everyone else and would you like another cup of tea vicar? Even if one of your characters is a loon who likes to open people up with a pair of blunt scissors to see what secrets they are hiding from him, if that facet of his character is on show, then it's fairly obvious whodunnit. Or at least it is to me. So a great deal of the art of crime fiction lies in hiding the character of at least one of your protagonists behind a series of plot devices that have to be overcome by one of the other protagonists (usually the detective, but sometimes a sweet little old lady who wouldn't hurt a fly) before the grisly conclusion. Or at least that's how it works in the crime fiction I've read (which is perhaps not a fully representative spectrum of the genre).
So, I was talking about planning novels, I think. It was book four where I began to analyse the way I plan (or don't plan) more. Books five and six are the first two parts of a planned four part epic fantasy (originally with a dragon as the hero and sheep as the villains, but Mr Stuart told me no-one would take sheep seriously as evil. He doesn't know them. He really doesn't.) True to form, I wrote book two first, then realised that I hadn't really planned things well enough. The book I had written needed a prologue, which ended up another novel. The world I've created for this fantasy grows more complex with every day and it is likely that before I can even think of sending it to a publisher the whole thing will have to be rewritten from start to finish. But I can't do that until I've done books three and four. And I haven't even got a plan for these yet... ;[
Some writers plan meticulously, down to the last detail, before they put pen to paper. Others refuse to plan, saying that if they knew how the book was going to end they would lose interest in it before they had finished writing it. I suspect that most of us muddle along somewhere in between. And in the end, if we plan or if we wing it, the finished article is never quite what we intended it to be.
And if it was, where would be the fun in that?
Nevertheless, since all I know about the British planning system is a: supremely boring; and b: that it is likely to turn me prematurely grey (or gray if you're in America), and since I haven't actually embarked on any plans as such (at least not beyond the scribbles on bits of paper depicting palaces I could never afford to build), I will instead regale you both with my thoughts on planning novels.
I have to date written six of the things - none yet having been read by anyone beyond my immediate circle of friends and family. You'd think I'd know better by now but I don't. I've also written a travel book, but the less said about that the better.
The first three had no plan at all when I started on them, beyond a vague idea of a plot and some lead characters. Each of them had to undergo major structural rewriting to weed out all the problems that occurred, so for the fourth book I thought I would plan.
I have endless reams of paper scrawled across in my illegible handwriting. Ideas, characters, descriptions of worlds and societies. Sometimes I think better whilst typing, so there are innumerable files on my computer full of useless nonsense. In the end I had a plot all nicely boiled down into about eighty sections where 'something happened'. The whole seemed to build up nicely into a climactic resolution that nevertheless left the door wide open for a sequel, or even a series. Then I started to write.
Within a dozen pages a completely new character forced herself into the narrative and swept the hero protagonist off his feet. Her father was a minor player, whose death early on was an important turning point. She popped into my head as an easy way of making his character more interesting for the short time it was in the book. She met up with the hero and one thing lead to another. The remaining seventy-eight sections had to be revised, bodged, hacked and mangled together to make room for her. I was far too lazy to go back and start the whole planning process over again.
There is a point to this rambling, I'm sure. I may even get to it one day. I have written in a number of genres - SF, fantasy, magical realism (whatever that is). I've written comic scripts about alien invasions and an amusing tale about an Edinburgh man on a gruesome mission to rid the world of the evil that is children (along with Mr Stuart, who drew the pictures and thrashed out the subtler plot points with me over many, many pints of beer. Those were the days). I've even written a travel book about a trip I went on with some friends, bicycling around the north of Scotland. For all these and more, see the DevilDog Website. All these stories are character driven. They start with the characters and then I just see where they go.
Now, those of you who are fans of crime fiction will instantly see the folly in this approach. Especially if your characters are all, deep down, decent honest people who would really just like to get on with everyone else and would you like another cup of tea vicar? Even if one of your characters is a loon who likes to open people up with a pair of blunt scissors to see what secrets they are hiding from him, if that facet of his character is on show, then it's fairly obvious whodunnit. Or at least it is to me. So a great deal of the art of crime fiction lies in hiding the character of at least one of your protagonists behind a series of plot devices that have to be overcome by one of the other protagonists (usually the detective, but sometimes a sweet little old lady who wouldn't hurt a fly) before the grisly conclusion. Or at least that's how it works in the crime fiction I've read (which is perhaps not a fully representative spectrum of the genre).
So, I was talking about planning novels, I think. It was book four where I began to analyse the way I plan (or don't plan) more. Books five and six are the first two parts of a planned four part epic fantasy (originally with a dragon as the hero and sheep as the villains, but Mr Stuart told me no-one would take sheep seriously as evil. He doesn't know them. He really doesn't.) True to form, I wrote book two first, then realised that I hadn't really planned things well enough. The book I had written needed a prologue, which ended up another novel. The world I've created for this fantasy grows more complex with every day and it is likely that before I can even think of sending it to a publisher the whole thing will have to be rewritten from start to finish. But I can't do that until I've done books three and four. And I haven't even got a plan for these yet... ;[
Some writers plan meticulously, down to the last detail, before they put pen to paper. Others refuse to plan, saying that if they knew how the book was going to end they would lose interest in it before they had finished writing it. I suspect that most of us muddle along somewhere in between. And in the end, if we plan or if we wing it, the finished article is never quite what we intended it to be.
And if it was, where would be the fun in that?
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