It's been awhile since I talked about my writing method. Possibly because I'm still trying to figure it out myself. I'm kind of a contradiction. I need a plan. I can't function if I don't know where I'm going. Yet at the same time, all the minute details of a well thought out plan overwhelm me and stress me out because I can't possibly keep up with them all, and then it's just easier to not do anything at all. The other thing is that if I get too into my planning brain, I get analytical and squash my creativity. This is true in life as well as writing, and it's difficult, because it's a hard balance to find between the two.
I'm working on figuring out exactly how I write best, and that's not easy. Especially when most writing resources out there are plan heavy. Outline your novel with the snowflake method. Plan out your plot points and story structure. Outline, outline, outline. Plan, plan, plan. But for me, detailed plans don't work.
I've analyzed the way I wrote before I started struggling with writing. I know, analyzing it sounds counter-intuitive, and it kind of is, but I discovered something. I write best somewhere in the middle of extreme plotting and extreme pantsing. Which really makes sense. For my early stories, well, basically everything up through
Time Captives, I had a very general plan in my head. I had my beginning. I had maybe a couple of random stops along the way. The Battle of Feliho Forest in
Across the Stars was one of those random stops, though it turned out differently from how I planned. Miss Reginald's experiment on Edmund Rubin "to see what kind of a monster I can create" in
The Experiment was another, and one that played in my head like a clip in a movie trailer. And then I had my end goal. Save Emoria. Free America. Defeat the strytes and establish Joseph and Olivia as king and queen of Calhortz.
And then within that basic framework, I had total creative freedom. Honestly, though, even that framework was fluid. I rarely wrote any notes down. If a previously created scene didn't end up working for the way the story was going, it was out. And that was sad, especially if I was particularly attached to it, but it was okay.
I'm trying to return to that with
Acktorek. Mainly because the more I've tried to outline, the stiffer and more contrived my stories feel. Stories need to be organic and flow naturally. There can be plenty of rabbit trails and extra fluff in a first draft. That's why we have rewriting and editing. Then sometimes the rabbit trails and extra fluff turn out to be incredibly important. If I hadn't made random decisions and gone down rabbit trails in
Time Captives, we wouldn't have Adriel!
I have a general plan for
Acktorek. I have my beginning. I have a few random scenes along the way, one being that wrong turn I took a few months ago. It belongs in the middle, not close to the beginning. I'm not really sure of my ending. The short story I wrote that sparked the book is from somewhere in the climax, so I have a general idea of where it's going, but who's going to survive? I don't know. How will Emma's life be changed? I don't know. What direction will Mitchell's life take after this? I don't know. Will Emma and Mitchell end up together? My original snippet indicated probably, the beginning of the story convinced me absolutely not, my sister says they have to, and I'm currently undecided and not telling you which direction I'm currently leaning.
In a way, it's scary to not know how I'm going to get from point A to point B. Especially considering that this kind of story has a much less straightforward storyline than the save-the-world plots I usually write. Sometimes I don't know what's going to happen next. Actually, a lot of times and then something random happens and I hope it's good. I kind of just have to make it up as I go along, and hope I do it as brilliantly as the Doctor. ;) But it's certainly interesting, and in a lot of ways, it's freeing. I don't have to worry about working in every detail in the first draft. I can explore. I can discover new things. It's like the sonnet, which Mrs. Whatsit compared to life:
Braden has one goal: knighthood.