One Direction Writing Guide

Part Two: Planning

Quick Author's Note: Sorry for the delay, but my laptop crashed bigtime. I'm reveling in having it back right now. So here's Part Two of Planning.

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PLANNING

Ah, planning. The part everyone hates and never want to do. Yet it's the second most crucial part of your story.

You need to plan. It's pretty obvious to me when a writer makes everything up from scratch. There are huge plot holes, silly, air touched ideas that make you want to bang your head against a railing,     and it's just doesn't reach  it's full potential.

Plus, a writer gets tired really quickly from making up ideas and the lack of response from the audience. So these stories tend to be abandoned very fast.

If you have a scene you know is brilliant, write it down. There's no need to wait until you finish planning. Keep that scene in a notebook or Word Doc and incorporate later into your story. 

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THE METHODS

There are two types of fanfiction: A quick, humorous piece that's just for fun, or a full on story that's going to be your masterpiece and you're willing to spend effort on.

For the first type, depending on how long you expect it to be, write a paragraph. It can be from 3-10 sentences. That's enough. Within those sentences, you can connect a plot. 

Here's an example:

Lisa Blake, Prank Patrol screenwriter, meets One Direction. She's struck with a brilliant idea to prank the boys. Conspiring with Paul and the hotel manager, the boys find the hotel completely deserted... and rigged with pranks. In the end, there's only one thing the boys know: They'll never forget Canada.

So yeah, really simple and stupid. And  unique if you can make it. In the plot line above, all you really have to do is come up with a couple of fun pranks.

Now for the OTHER route....

SERIOUS FANFICS

I won't lie, these are hard to write. Planning can make the job easier for you. 

I recently heard of a method called "The Snowflake Method." It's made by a guy named Randy Ingermann so I'm not taking credit for his work. He also has a software called Snowflake Pro which you can download for a $100. So you know if you want to... (I didn't).

The Snowflake Method is complicated and will take you about a week to go through. No one wants to do that, so I modified it for us amateurs.

First of all, summarize your entire plot line in ONE to TWO sentences. I'll admit, that's a tall order. 

Example:

Liam Payne falls into depression and attends therapy with Dr. Liz Miller. He at first dreads it, but later becomes friends with her.

The key is to forget about the details and just write down the main idea. It's hard, but it'll provide the skeleton to your story.

Now take that and turn it into a 5-10 sentence. Randy does this Three-Act Structure thing (Beginning- Problem One- Problem Two- Problem Three- Ending). I personally don't like that structure much. It just feels really restricting to me. 

I like going the old fashioned route: Expo, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Resolution. It just leaves a lot of legroom for me, I guess. 

So here's an example:

When his girlfriend dies of cancer, Liam is broken. It's obvious he's dealing horribly with it so the boys send him to therapy. There he meets Liz Miller, a brand new intern who's assigned to help him. At first she's awkward and silent and he dreads meeting her. One day, she finds him cutting and tries to understand him for the first time. They become friends and slowly fall in love. However, Liam thinks it's too soon for him to get another girlfriend and they decide to stay friends.

And there's my paragraph. It's seven sentences and summarizes the entire plotline. The ending wasn't exactly happy, but it was an ending. 

After that, turn each SENTENCE into a paragraph. The ideal paragraph should by more than three sentences, but less than fifteen. You don't need to plan THAT hard for a fanfic. 

I'm not going to do an example for that, because it's slightly too long for something I don't think I'm going to do.

Of course, you could keep going and turn each paragraph into four pages, but seriously...?

So that's our planning: Sentence to Paragraph to Actual Story.

Sometimes, however, the characters or plot line need to adapted to fit into the story. There's nothing worse than misfit characters or an awkward plot.

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So there's are planning section. I'm sorry if it's not that good, but I'm seriously really tired. Part Three shall be better.