So with school starting there are all sorts of back to school sales one of which I like more than others.
The Notebook sales.
You can get tons of new notebooks at cheaper prices than you can any other time of year. And with every new notebook comes a new story. New stories always seem fun at the beginning. Creating whole new worlds, people and stories that no one has ever read or thought of before. And your job? To get the whole story across in a way so that everyone will be able to see, hear, taste, touch and smell exactly what you can see, hear, taste, touch and smell inside your own mind. So with the idea of plotting in mind I would like to address one of the biggest division in the writing community.
Plotters and Pantsers.
Like lots of blooming writers out there you probably have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about. "Whats a pantser?" Your probably wondering. Well let me tell you that your not the only writer out there whose just blooming into their writing that has absolutely no idea what a plotter is let alone a pantser. And let me tell you that despite what anyone might say, no one knows everything about writing going into it. I've been writing for almost 10 years and look at me, not published, and still constantly learning. Even authors who already published admit that they are still learning things all the time. But I digress.
Lets start with Plotters. Plotters are basically defined in their name. They plot things. There can be everything from extreme plotters who plot everything from the dialogue to the descriptions. Are there are more loose plotters who write the basic scene ideas and put them in order. There are plotters who write out what they want to happen and then order the ideas into a plot line. There are those who brainstorm using the childlike plotting techniques taught in elementary schools such as the spiderweb diagram or others. I tried plotting the way my cousin did once by writing my scenes down on index cards and organizing them into a coherent plot line but that didn't really work for me.
There are also Pantsers. Pantsers are referred to by such due to the way they tend to write their novels by the seat of their pants. They write a scene or two to start the novel and then they make it up as they go along, writing it like they would live life. Lots of pantsers get pretty far in their writing career without plotting at all but eventually you've got to plot something or you never get anything done. I have a friend who is a pantser who can come up with some pretty decent plot lines just by pantsing her way through a story. Some super talented pantsers can write whole book series without plotting a single thing. Of course the pantsing way of writing takes a lot of editing later on because most pantsers tend to ramble.
Personally its taken me a long time just to discover the way that I write. I'm neither a pantser nor a plotter. I come up with a world first drawing a random map from my mind and then come up with random characters that I like. After which I create cultures and histories for the worlds that my characters come from even if its a small history like, a great power almost destroyed the land hundreds of years ago, its power still lingers, about 30 years ago there was a great warrior. I don't make it so complicated that I can't keep track of it but I don't completely get rid of it either. After I have these a create a story idea, almost like the synopsis that goes on the back of the book. Then I pick which character I want to be my MC and then I create a few key plot points to center around that character. Once these plot points have been established I've finished the plotting process and I now begin the pantsing process. I don't write my books in chronological order. Maybe on Monday I feel like writing a scene near the middle of the book and on Tuesday I feel like writing chapter one. But I continue this only writing the scenes I feel like writing until I've written all of them. Then I get down to the nitty gritty of writing the small scenes that fit between the scenes that I've already written, connecting them into a tangent story line and when this is complete I do the editing to make sure that the scenes that weren't written together are still coherent and flow like a real story and then I do the basic editing for normal writing things.
So what type of writer are you? A Plotter? A Pantser? Or do you not know yet? If you don't I would suggest looking up different ways to plot and pants your novels and then pick a way that works best for you. Or find a way thats almost perfect but not quite and tweek it to fit you. Just like a bullet journal it's all up to you how you personalize it.
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