cool and unusual punishment

Writing Tips: Planning

(I was going to do an art book update and then started talking about my planning process. I decided to post it here once it became evident, about a thousand words in, that I wasn't going to get to the art.)

I have a tendency to create dozens of auxiliary stories all at once, then go for months without any new ideas. I had at least four new book ideas at camp and then once I got home, at least five more, so currently I'm a little overwhelmed. This seems like a good thing, because I'll need new books to work on when I'm done with my current ones, but I'd take one great idea over ten decent ones any day just because fleshing out one story enough to write it takes dozens of hours. My documents are already ten to twenty pages long before I ever write them. Amalgama sits at a clean 35 at the moment, and I'd say it's aaaaaalmost ready to go.

What takes up all this space? I plan every single chapter (if you don't do this already, START, it does miracles for your pacing but it'll also keep you from getting stuck or burned out), write a few pages of quotes to make sure I have the hang of the characters, and write down general plot synopses as well as questions I have going forwards. If I run into any planning bumps I put them at the top of the document so I always see them first upon entering and I can ruminate on them while working on the story itself.

While I have a lot of ideas that seem good on paper (or digital space, I guess?), I tend to run into two major issues with my stories: vagueness and redundancy.

Vague ideas are one of the reason people on Wattpad do not finish their stories. People have a few characters or an idea they like and figure they can pants the hell out of it. They get six chapters in and realize there is no central conflict and start improvising until they get bored. I know this for a fact because I read so many books where THE CONFLICT CHANGES HALFWAY THROUGH THE BOOK. People can't decide on what they want their story to be because they never planned that far.

Hint: Always ask yourself, WHAT IS THE PLOT? Start. Middle. End. What issues do your protagonists encounter? What are some smaller, chapter to chapter struggles?

In other words: make an outline. Make an outline. MAKE AN OUTLINE.

If you get bored with your story while making an outline or you're stuck, feel free to start, but don't post it until you have that outline done. Trust me. The outline is your friend. If you can not outline your story, chances are you won't be able to write your story, either. Every project I have ever failed was because I didn't make the outline. Most of the stories on here which were obviously completed without an outline had issues that would have been fixed if the author used an outline.

So I come into story ideas like this:

Right brain: Holy shit! I have this incredible book idea for a story about a world where magic is generated from emotion!

Left brain: Oh nice! What's the plot?

Right brain: ...

Left brain: Put it on the pile.

That story is old as Deja Vu and is sitting in the auxiliary dumpster pile.

Besides vagueness, there are other tiny red flags in an idea that often leave them on the dumpster pile. Sometimes it's unfortunate implications I can't seem to work out: for example, in the above story, pain is the most powerful emotion so the main character has a bunch of tiny knives with which to lacerate herself. I don't want to give anyone any ideas or promote an incredibly risky and unhealthy behavior, so Hemera (my main) is going to sit on the pile for a bit. Maybe forever.

Character vagueness is poison for any of my stories because I am a character first kind of person. If the characters don't make me feel anything I am not going to write about them. Spending more than a few hours with lackluster characters is death itself. Extraordinary kept getting canned because of this, but honestly, Ylva wasn't THAT bad. I have done significantly worse- no one here has been around long enough to remember the original Double Rainbow sequel, Tails of Fate, but let's just say no one misses it. Not even me. ovo

If the story sucks but the characters are good, they might work their way into something. For example, Garrett and Karen were based off of an unnamed character and Nyx from Project Thundercloud, a story I had going in October about hacking that I didn't write due to a lack of expertise in the subject area. Of course, this means that the original story is effectively dead, which brings me to my next area...

Reeeeeeeeedundancy.

A lot of my stories have similar themes (family, loss, time travel, death, that feeling you get when your life is crashing down around your ears) and even similar characters (Dill/Indy, Evan/Gale, Serena/Lisa/a few aux kids, etc etc). A close friend of mine says that all of our ideas are quickly approaching one story, which we as artists are unknowningly seeking, which I think is a neat idea- is there something, above all else, that you feel called to do in your writing? What do you do when you get there? Can you get there?

That said, I think most people can agree that you can't write the same book forever or you end up like most of the current YA market- you're either stealing from yourself or the more successful person next to you.

And that's stupid!

I throw out a lot of ideas because when I make them in waves, a lot of them tend to be similar to an eerie degree. I'll have a whole batch of dream related stories, then a bunch of them that involve some kind of heart/bodyswap, and lately the theme seems to be "full government overthrow" because something something magic, something something dystopia, something something lots of action sequences. Sometimes I'll get way further into planning and realize the stories are too similar for my tastes (Lux/Deja Vu/Extraordinary/Whitewoods, but I'm still writing all four of these because I care too deeply for them... most of them...). No, the best thing to do is let your stories duke it out and devour each other like shark embryos in the womb. You might think you're losing something of value by combining stories of characters but really, you go from five small sharks with lousy chances of survival to one or two much larger sharks who will likely make it much further in life. Only then can they be free to swim in the oceans of The General Public or The Back of Your Mind Somewhere Because You Already Have Sixty Projects Going.

Your best bet if you're a ChronaLilly story sitting in the auxiliary dumpster pile is to have the above covered, get stuck in my head like a bad pop song and take up residence there, be spontaneous enough that it doesn't look like you're ripping any of my other stories off, or have Evan Drake. No lie, I wrote Deja Vu because I was drawing all my auxiliary characters out and the only one who looked like any fun was that boi. Evan would love to know that he effectively called his own universe into existence. Given, I drew Will and Adam too, but anyone who's read Deja Vu can agree that those two are kind of a mess.

That said, I knew Deja Vu would be written from that moment on, and I had no villains, little more than a concept and a handful of characters, and a lot of plot holes. As calculated as I made the above process seem, passion is what eventually makes or breaks a story. This is actually WHY I recommend spending so much time on planning. You might think your affection for the story will dwindle and that you should just pump it out, but stories that are worth telling stay with you. They will not leave you alone unless you write them. As such, tempered passion- careful planning mixed with all the devotion and general insanity that is creating a new universe- can be a very powerful tool indeed.