Every writer plans before they write, even the so-called “pantsers.” Some just plan more than others. However, before we begin writing, we all start with an idea that has begun to unfurl itself into something larger within us. As a planner, I then spend a lot of time with that idea and poke at the various tendrils to see the different directions it can go. I don’t plan every little detail, but I have a solid idea of the overarching story long before I sit down to write it. No two writers will have the same ritual, some even vary their style from story to story. But I find that learning about other writers’ routines often helps give me ideas for my own. Here’s mine in case it might help you.
Forming the Idea
This is always the hardest part to describe. It starts as a sliver of something, a loose abstract concept that slowly grows in weight. Often, it’s only a feeling or emotion at first. Perhaps loneliness has been on my mind a lot, or frustration with how easily people can be dismissive of the needs of others. I’m not even thinking about making it a story yet at this point, but something important to me begins to increasingly draw my thoughts.
Then, something will happen; usually something I see happen to someone else. Maybe I’m watching tv or reading the news or browsing social media. Maybe I’m listening to a friend vent or eavesdropping on a conversation at the coffee shop. And something about this incident will resonate with the feeling that has been dominating my mind.
For example, when I wrote “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” I had been thinking a lot about how prejudices are passed down to us through social context, especially within families. I struggled to nail down how I felt about it. The negative aspects are obvious, prejudice is unquestionably bad. However, there are evolutionary reasons for why we have evolved to be strongly influenced by the beliefs of our parents and those around us, mainly safety – if you’re told that berry is poisonous, it’s beneficial to be naturally inclined to believe that as a fact rather than questioning the rules of the world and testing every berry yourself. So, is it a good thing or a bad thing that the beliefs of those who raise us subconsciously influence us?
After almost a year of this topic constantly coming up in my mind, my husband and I moved into a new house. There was a lot to do and rather than decorating right away, I just threw the pictures we had up on whatever nails the previous owners had left behind. A few weeks later, I was staring at the haphazard decorations and suddenly got this powerful sense of the people who had put those nails up for their own pictures. I realized how I had merely laid our lives over the template that they left behind and this really resonated with the thoughts that I had been having. Suddenly, I knew I had a story, and it was about both the good and bad that comes from living our lives by the templates laid before us.
Finding the Form
Once an idea springs into my mind like this, it’s all I can think about. I tortured my husband by making him to listen to me running through it repeatedly, trying to find the way to tell it. At first, I thought it was going to be a long form piece examining scenarios in which people make their decisions based on what someone else has told them or given them and concentrating on the consequences thereof. But I couldn’t find the common thread that felt powerful enough to evoke the vastness that this network of mores effects.
Whenever I find myself stuck trying to find the shape of a story, I turn to a craft book. I find that reading about writing helps my mind hop out of the ruts I fall into (like being reliant on a linear timeline). This time, I picked up Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison at the urging of one of my academic mentors. This craft book looks at different formats for stories beyond the traditional three-act structure. To hell with Freytag’s pyramid. The same mentor suggested that I think about trying a story in the cell-network structure that Alison describes and, once again, another piece suddenly clicked into place. Cells, society, a repeating pattern… bees. That’s when I realized that I was writing a short-form, non-linear piece that traced the connections between honeybees on a honey farm and the generations of the family who runs it. It was almost time to start writing.
Structuring the Stories
Every good story is actually at least two stories, change my mind.
There is the surface story, the story about the family and the bees. And there’s the real story, the story about the burden of heritage. I’ll also argue that every good story needs to have a flow in tension. In the traditional structure, tension builds like a wave that crests just before the climax where it releases, and we ride it out through the denouement. That flow can take many shapes, but it still needs to be there. So, for me, the next step is figuring out what scenes and plot points to put where to tell both stories with an appropriate build and release of tension to maintain interest and create impact.
The way I do this varies from story to story. For “Sluts,” I made voice notes on my phone about the way I wanted the most intense scenes to play out. Then, I transcribes the notes and arranged them so that the strength of the scenes matched the form I had chosen (the traditional form, in that case). For “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” I used a word association exercise where I started with ‘hive’ and followed the word association line till it covered both the good and bad sides of heritage that I wanted to address. Then I wrote a scene based off of each word in that order.
For Shadowbound, I had to spend a lot of time with the protagonist to understand the decisions she would make when faced with each of the obstacles I was thinking of throwing at her. I wrote each one down on an index card, plus a few other scenes that were necessary for plot, then threw the cards in the air and played 50-card-pickup. Once everything was sufficiently buggered, I walked away from the stack for a while so I could get some distance from any order I had in mind when I wrote them. A week later, I came back and sorted through them and made a map of the way I felt they flowed together the best.
Writing
This is where I start writing. Unlike some planners, each scene I have planned out usually has only the vaguest of outlines. The index card for chapter two of Shadowbound just said “diner, set up town atmosphere.” What happens in that scene, who says or does what, is usually something that I discover as I’m writing. This also means that my story often takes on its own momentum and I end up changing the outline I created so much that, by the time the story is finished, it looks nothing like my original plan.
Nonetheless, I still create a plan every time because it helps me figure out what to write next whenever my own momentum starts to slow. And since the plan is usually vague to begin with, it is easy to adapt. This way, I’m never stalled out in the writing stage because I’ve already given myself a roadmap.
