Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay
I’m a big fan of puzzles. Yesterday, I received a shipment of two puzzles from Barnes and Noble to help keep my sane during my hermitage (sounds better than quarantine). It got me thinking that my love of puzzles explains a lot about how I write books—a process that I call “puzzling.”
Since I promised you a down and dirty overview of different writing processes, I figured now what a good time to write about it. Below is a summary of plotting and (by-the-seat-of-your)-pantsing followed by an in-depth description of puzzling. Enjoy!
Plotting
Plotters plan out the story in advance. They essentially draw a map before they head out on their quest. They make sure they have their supplies in order. They use tools like Excel or outlines to careful plan their story.
My plotter friends assure me that their plan isn’t as set in stone as I imagine. Instead, this is a plan that needs to be flexible. These people tell me stories of sending synopses to editors and then freaking out because some new twist popped up while writing.
Plotters, in general, tend to write more plot-driven stories.
By-the -Seat-of-Your-Pants Writing aka “Pansters”
Pantsers take off on the journey like the fool in tarot. They may have a tiny little hobo bag slung over their shoulder and their general approach is that they’ll figure things out as they go.
Pantsers fear synopses. The fun is in discovering the story as you go.
Pantsers can tend toward more character driven stories.
The Problem with Binaries
New writers hear the terms “plotter” and “pantser” all the time. It’s used like “Sharks” and “Jets” to divide people into writing gangs. But the truth is that most people fall on some sort of spectrum.
Most people exist somewhere on a spectrum between the two.
What do they have in common?
1. The pure plotters and pantsers tend to write linearly.
2. May edit as they write or wait until the end.
3. Each can be pretty hardcore about defending their approaches
The problems:
Pantsers can get lost in the weeds or find out too late they took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.
Plotters can create overly formulaic stories.
The linearity of both approaches creates more opportunities for blocks.
Before I tell you about a third option, let me just set the record straight. The process that gets the story written is the proper process. I can’t tell you how many mystery authors have told me that I have to plot. They say that because they don’t know how to write a mystery without plotting. If you can write a good one by pantsing or some other process then that’s totally fine and good.
I just prefer to do things a different way that combines plotting and pantsing but also uses a non-linear approach to both—think of it as being pantextual.
Puzzling
But first some background: When I started writing I feel in with a critique group of published category romance authors. Lovely ladies who taught me a lot about the business and introduced me to the plotting board concept which I’ll show you in a moment. But they had been working together for twenty years before I joined and they had “their way” of writing and tried to impose it on me. The rejections I got back then all said the book sounded like a category romance even though I was trying to write what is called a single title. Then I brought them a UF project and they said I couldn’t do it because I killed someone in chapter one. That book ended up being Red-Headed Stepchild, the book that landed me a six-figure 3 book deal and eventually landed me on the USA Today list.
Luckily, I left that group and went on to write RHSC my way. But it still took me a couple of years to understand my writing process. The epiphany happened after I’d rewritten the second book in that series … I broke down crying at my first Romantic Times convention in front of a bunch of bestselling authors. I admitted that I’d totally sunk my career before it really got started because I didn’t know how to write a book. I will never forget Richelle Meade patting me on the shoulder and saying, “You know we do each other a disservice by always pretending everything’s okay and not talking about these struggles.”
This is why I decided to finally create a talk about this. Because every time I’m at a book event and mention how I write, I see several pairs of eyes light up with hope. Inevitably one of them shyly comes up to me after my talk or the panel and says, “I thought it was just me. I thought I was going it wrong.”
After months of struggling through several drafts of The Mage in Black, book 2 of the Sabina Kane series, my editor said, “What happens when you start a story?” She asked good questions, and eventually, she announced that I was something called a “Scene Writer.” “I’ve worked with another one of you before.”
I was mystified. I’d never heard of anything by plotting and pantsing. What I figure out is that as a scene writer, I write my books as discrete scenes, almost like individual short stories, that I then go back and link together using transition scenes and fleshing out layers. I write these scenes out of order. This non-linear approach keeps my brain from relying on formula—instead my stories grow from the world and the characters and then I figure out what the story is from the scenes I write.
Yet I still yearned to be a plotter. To my mind, plotters had it way easier. They knew their story would work. They just had to sit down and write it scene by scene. While I felt like I was wandering around in a maze chased by a minotaur, unsure I’d survive the process until I type The End. Yet I have learned that when I plot and when I pants linearly I craft boring, formulaic stories. It’s so bad that the editor I mentioned before forbade me to ever plot again.
So how do I get to The End?
1. Get an idea and play with it. Usually I’ll write a scene to get the idea out of my head. A character and situation might intrigue me enough to find out more.
2. Research phase. I recently read The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp and she gave me the perfect metaphor for this step. Whenever Twyla started a project, she’d get herself a simple cardboard file box. She’d write the name of the project on the box and throw in a piece of paper with her goal for the project. Then she’d start throwing pieces of music, articles, books, images, DVDs of movies, accessories, etc. I was intrigued by this idea because it’s basically what happens when I begin world building for a new story. I open a word doc that I call my Dump File. In it, I copy and paste snatched of articles, images, etc. as I explore the subject related to my story concept. I also read a ton of non-fiction books. I also use Pinterest for this and do things like create playlists. I start broadly, learning everything I can about the topics I’d like to include in my world and then I begin whittling all of that into some world rules. It helps me figure out my Macro Level World but also give me material that will eventually inform the micro-level details that will be created on the fly as I write. It also tells me figure out what sort of characters we’ll find in that world and the elements and events that shaped my protagonist.
By doing this, I’m also creating a box in my brain. As I research, I’m filling that box with possibilities. I make new connections between ideas and images. Or maybe it’s more like filling a magic 8 ball with options. Once the ball is full and I begin to write, as I need ideas it will offer up the answers from the depths of that inky water.
3. Scenes. Now that I have a sandbox built, it’s time to play. From all of that research and world building, situations begin to play out in my head, like scenes from a movie. I don’t question where they’ll go in the movie. I just write them down. I don’t attach too much to any of them because I need to keep things loose right now. It’s about possibilities. I never know which parts of these scenes will be important: Is it a character, a setting, a seemingly minor detail from a conversation? I don’t know, so I just put it down without a lot of judgment.
4. Eventually, I run out of steam. I’ve done this long enough that now I can tell when I’m forcing things instead of simply recording images offered up from my subconscious.
5. Here’s where the story board comes in.
Storyboard:
1. This tool works for plotters, pantsers, or puzzlers. You just use it at different points in the process. Plotters can plot their story out on the board and use it as a map. Pantsers can lay out post its while they write scenes to see where they’ve been.
2. This is a perfect tool for visual writers. Do you see the story as a movie in your head? Do you need to see pictures of your characters or setting for it to come together?
3. If you don’t want to use a big poster board or foamcore, you can use Scrivener’s corkboard.
4. Reveals patterns. Can use different post its for POVs characters, subplots, etc.
Here’s what I do:
Take a big poster board. Divide it into four horizontal rows (make lines using a ruler and Sharpie). Each row is an Act: Act I, Act IIA, Act IIB, Act III. (The fact that three-act structure is really fours acts is a topic for another post). My loose structure is that by the time I reach the end of a row, there needs to be a big reversal or reveal in the story.
Next, I get Post-It notes. I’ve done it all in one color, I’ve used different colors for different POV characters, and I’ve different colors for different subplots. Totally up to you.
On these Post-Its, I write a one-sentence scene summary or goal. It might be something like “Kate interrogates Abe” or “Sabina and Adam Kiss” or “Giguhl gets in trouble.”
How I use it:
1. Lay out current scenes in about the act you think it’ll go. The beauty of the Post-Its is you can move them around like PUZZLE PIECES—get it?
2. Look for patterns and opportunities
3. Do any new scene ideas occur to you as you survey what you have? Create Post-its for what’s missing (I often use a special color for these so I can see which scenes I need to write)
4. Start creating a structure. The visual helps you see if the flow of plot and subplots is working.
5. From this start writing scenes again
6. Write until you’re pretty close to a complete draft
7. Return to board. Replot what you have. Refine your structure.
8. As you revise, refer to storyboard to see what you should be working on.
Drawbacks of Puzzling:
-You never know whether the story will come together until near the very end. It usually does, but it won’t ever feel like it will until it does.
-Lots of revision required to smooth out narrative and create transitions. I also have to do a lot of layering passes to make sure the scenes I wrote are working on enough narrative levels.
-You need an editor who trusts you. I was lucky to worth with an editor who hated synopses so she never made me turn them in. Instead, my proposals were big-picture and focused on character and world building rather than specific plot points.
-It takes discipline with your deadlines. It’s easy to drag out the scene writing phase so long that you don’t leave yourself enough time to revise. This means you’ll need a lot of rounds of revisions with your editor—if you have an editor who edits and who is patient. If you don’t have those two things, your books won’t get the attention they need and won’t be good.
Benefits of Puzzling:
-Helps me bypass my natural tendency toward perfectionism. Perfectionism leads to procrastination. Having strategies that remove the idea that something needs to be perfectly crafted helps.
-Stories are not formulaic. The reason I shouldn’t plot is that when I write linearly and I hit a speedbump, I fall back on formula. Circumventing that by writing out of order allows me to write stories with innovative twists and turns. But because it grows organically, they also tend to be what Hemingway called “Surprising yet inevitable.”
-I can go to the scenes I want to write instead of forcing myself to write the next scene on the list. I call this “going where the juice is” because if I want to write a fight scene, I can, but some days I’m in the mood for something funny or romantic. I get to write what I’m excited to write, which means I don’t have boring scenes in my books.
Got questions about puzzling? Let’s chat about it in comments.
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This really strikes a chord with me! I feel like I have pieces of my story coming at different stages without as much linear sense. Thank you for sharing your process.
Just got to reading this....thank you. By the way, are ya in for a good chuckle? The box thing and the computer file. I still, even though I know this is irrational, want the big box. I want to toss in every detail that comes to me. But how to get that image you found on the computer into the box. Like that. Virtual world to reality in a box can be an issue. And, vice versa. *pounding dinner table with fork* I want the box. Holding things informs me how it feels. Smell them...well not rotten fruit or meat. See the twig I found and intend to use in my current story. Image of an old friend that reminds me of a character but dislodge it from the album. Probably not. Such a dilemma.