Melissa Charles author

This is a follow-up to a previous post, found here

As I mentioned before, I’m normally a ‘pantser.’ Someone who has a vague, hazy idea of how the book might go, and discovers the whole of it during the writing.

A process I love, by the way. No shade on pantsers. I just had this suspicion, like an itch I can’t quite reach. You know the one, that’s always on the spot by your shoulder blade you can’t reach until you either beg someone else to scratch it for you, or find yourself rubbing against a doorframe like a domesticated version of Baloo and singing ‘Bear Necessities’ under your breath.

Where was I? Right. Plotting.

The point I was attempting to make is that I’ve had this sneaking suspicion that plotting would make writing in this genre easier. Maybe not easier, but might save me having to completely reverse engineer my first draft, and maybe pare down the number of rewrites I needed to do.

I gathered coloured notecards, coloured sticky notes, a whiteboard, sticky putty and began.

Or tried to.

It turns out, when you’ve been pantsing it for years, planning feels a bit like trying to learn how to write with your non-dominant hand. You know how it’s supposed to work, but the actual execution is halting, messy and feels awkward as hell.

But, I stuck it out and am about halfway through the outline now. I don’t know if it’s going to help with the actual drafting, but plotting has forced me to think about details I’d normally put off until actually writing the scene. My character sheets are riddled with helpful descriptions like, “Personality: If FAFO were a person.” It’s going to be interesting to see if this actually streamlines the writing process or not, once I weigh how much time the outline took vs the writing.

I’m sure I’ll learn how to tweak things as I go, if it turns out that plotting does indeed turn my ‘squirrels at a rave’ method of writing into something that is more manageable and predictable. Because balance is good, right?

Definitely worth a shot.