I’ve always been a “pantser,” one of those authors who write by the seat of their pants. I would create characters and then sit back and watch to see what they did, or I’d get an inspiration for an individual scene and then later figure out how to fit it in. I remember in my earliest days as a writer, feeling like my plot was a handful of marbles that I had set on a table that kept rolling off onto the floor. I was still doing that a bit with the two novels I’ve completed: Symbiont, which is currently shelved after getting its first hundred rejections, and Waterlily, which I’m currently querying. I was always afraid that writing from an outline would mean having to write scenes that the structure demanded but that I found tedious. (And if I find it tedious, God help the poor reader who’s slogging through it.)
I’m working on a new novel now, The Family Demon, and this time, I’m being a hard-core planner. I know the Save the Cat books talk a lot about story beats, but at the moment my favorite how-to-do-it book for structure is Story Engineering by Larry Brooks. He lays out a map, breaking a novel or a screenplay into four parts with plot points and what he calls “pinch points” at specific places. Then he uses examples from well-known novels and movies to show how the successful ones, the ones that are real page turners, have followed it. Even unrepentant pantsers have generated the same structure unconsciously, when their instincts are very, very good.
I already had a dozen chapters for The Family Demon loosely sketched out when I went and dug up my copy of Story Engineering. In a Word document with two columns, I set my rough outline and Brooks’s map side-by-side. For the most part they lined up, but there were places where my scenes needed to be reordered to fit his scheme. And, you know what? When I did that, it made it better. Significantly better.
And none of the scenes I’ll be writing will be the least bit tedious.
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