Writing.Com General Discussion

I began, I suppose like most people, writing short stories and flash fiction. When I eventually decided I wanted to progress towards longer items - all the way up to novels - I decided that the only way I could achieve this was by acknowledging that writing is a process and to give that process due respect.

First off, a basic idea, the seed for a story, is quite insufficient to write a longer piece. Instead of sitting down to write immediately, I started playing with outlines, so I could (with very minimal effort) experiment with the story and see various ways it could progress to see what worked and what didn't. Discarding an outline of just a few hundred words is far less painful than a 200k word essay.

At the same time, these outlines were spinning out ideas for new elements to add to the story: new threads, new characters, new plot devices, twists and turns etc. I started making notes of these new things, and every so often I would read my journal just to refresh my memory of all the ideas that I'd collected for the story, and eventually a story would just leap off the page at me.

Next step is to plan the story. If you like writing by the seat of your pants, it still doesn't hurt to do a little planning. Figure out what the key scenes are (pay attention here to story structure), and then you can add the intervening scenes, the stepping stone scenes that take you from one key scene to the next.

When you actually come to write the story, the more control over the story you have, the more likely it is to come out the way you wanted. These days I go into much more depth than I've suggested above, but it doesn't suit everyone - you have to find your own level of how much detail you go into before embarking on writing, and some people will say that what I have suggested just kills their passion for the story before they've even written a word. Hence finding your own level.

The most important thing I have found, and this probably applies to everyone whethere they are a pantser or a plotter, is to not start writing straight away, but to think about the story and gather other ideas for those threads, twists and so on. Single threaded stories without plot twists are nowhere near as much fun to read, and equally not as fun to write.