Hey folks!
How is everyone? I got home from the mouth hygienist a while ago and my teeth still hurt. It wasn't a pleasant experience, but it was an experience, so I guess that counts for something!
All right.
How to plan a large project? I'm not actually sure about it myself. I'm still trying to figure it out. There are however two things that I'm relatively certain about.
The first one is that pantsing is fun but productive only to a certain extent. Do you like getting a COOL IDEA and just starting to write? Do you do it? How often does it fail and eventually give you a complete block/make you feel depressed?
For me the answer would be: frequently. This happened more than a few times before. I would get excited about an idea, start to write it, and at some point just give up because I hadn't thought about the story thoroughly. This happened way too often, and every time it does, it is a huge disappointment. The book starts out great... It has a shiny cover in my mind... and then it just fizzles out. Of course I don't immediately abandon it. I finish it anyway (mostly). But it has not yet happened that a story like this ever made sense. It simply had no substance between 'cool part I wanted to write'. And that doesn't work for a novel. (As evidenced by Stephen King's finish to his Dark Tower series by the way.)
What then does work for a novel?
We're getting to point two! This is the other concept I'm relatively sure about. It has to do with planning - even if that word still makes me feel icky. I've started to plan out a few stories. It hasn't been easy. It hasn't been as fun as just randomly pantsing either. But I do believe it's necessary. All I can write well when pantsing is maybe a story of 30k words. The rest needs to be outlined if it's supposed to be GREAT.
Of course, there are many pantsers who are good at writing whole novels, BUT, are they really? As popular as Stephen King is, at least I have to admit that I'm not blown away by the content in his books. There is little thought in them beyond shock and awe, and his themes (the importance of family et al.) are getting repetitive.
He's still a terrific writer - don't get me wrong! But I don't want to be like him. I want to be like myself. And I want to write deeper stories than SK does.
Unfortunately that requires planning.
But so does life.
If you don't have a plan you drift on the wind like a dandelion bauble. And that's fine... for a while. But after a while (in life this is usually when you hit 25/30. In stories this is when you hit the 30k words mark) it gets old and dry and you forget what you were doing at all.
Any story and any life needs direction. To drift is to have no purpose (it's in the word drift itself). And you can't drift your way through a 120k words manuscript. At least not if you want it to mean something to a reader.
What do you think? Really you should leave a comment! WriteBot wants to know!
All the best!
WriteBot
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