By the seat of my pants

Sheesh - already I'm having trouble keeping to my schedule and posting up something substantial everyday. Sigh...I guess I just need to kick myself in the ass a little more or I'm never going to manage to write the novel. Today's topic is going to be about the advantages and disadvantages of pre-planning the novel instead of just writing it as it goes along.

Historically I have been a write by the seat of your pants kind of guy. Once I got an idea I would batter it around mentally for a little bit, come up with a setting or characters (whichever wasn't the initial inspiration), then start writing the opening or a really good scene for the novel. I would get a really good momentum going and pound out some excellent scenes but slowly things would start to unravel. Generally my problem would be that I had a clear idea of who my characters were and what motived them and where I wanted the plot to end up - however I found myself at a loss of how to get to there from here.

I think my background in role-playing may be to blame for this problem since as a player I make the character, as a GM I have an idea of where I'm taking the plot, but as neither do I solely work on the middle. In roleplaying it is a give and take, each moving the plot along in ways that the other didn't expect - whereas in a novel I am solely responsible for this and can't rely on the other half of the GM/player partnership to move it along when my ideas are running short.

Last years novel ended up stalling at about 20,000 words because I didn't have a plan to take these initial motivations and difficulties that I wrote and use them as catalyst to drive the characters along and entangle them with the meat of the plot. Needless to say this pissed me off immensely since I liked the characters and the plot (at least in my opinion) quite good. Someday I imagine that I will go back and completely re-write the whole thing after running it through a serious planning stage. However that will have to wait until after this year.

This year I want to finish my novel and as the last attempt clearly demonstrated I need some pre-existing structure to pull this off. After talking to a number of other people about how they approached the planning phase of a novel, and looking over some strategies I came across one that I rather like and think should work for me. The method is called The Snowflake Process, and is put forward by a fairly nifty author by the name of Randall Ingermanson. The basic idea is that you start out with a very basic summary of the story and perform a series of sweeps that each add a new level of detail. While his opinion that writing without using a structure like this is a waste of time is not one I agree with, I still think it will make a very handy tool. The strategy as a whole is much more in depth than I had originally planned on using but I feel that even fleshing out through half the steps should leave me with a much more solid structure to hang my story off of - and if my ideas are unworkable I should know in advance of starting. So far I'm working on finishing off step 3, and we will be moving on to step 4 fairly soon.

Here's hoping that this will pay dividends when I get to writing the novel itself.