![]() Don’t let anyone tell you that outlining is required.īut I have discovered through experience that pantsing the entire novel seldom works for me, so here is where I take a step back from and work out the story’s overall shape. Up to this point, my approach is what writers call pantsing-figuring out the story by the seat of your pants. Here is when I know if the opening is the right one. Either it comes back later, better and stronger, or I never think about it again.)īut other times, this initial burst of writing calls up all kinds of new details about my characters, their world, and their personal history. (So far, I’ve never regretted deleting a half-born story. In the second, I file the document under “future ideas” and leave it to simmer. In the first case, I delete the document. Or sometimes the story lives, but I discover I don’t have the skills to do it justice. I write a chapter or two and find that the inspiration dies out. Here I’m trying to capture that first sense of story and character that fell into my brain. Research, edits, plotting can all take place later. I pour the words into my document without stopping to think about prose or worldbuilding. That might be a single scene, or it might be three chapters. Step one is to write as much as comes easily to me. Here is where I take the first tentative step in putting those images into words. By this point I’m getting snippets of scenes and dialog, all colored by emotion, invading my brainspace. I wait and let the ideas and images build until…įull-color video in surround sound. Stories can still die at this point, but less often. This, for me, is the true seed for a story, when the idea makes the leap from the abstract into characters moving through their world. ![]() I call this phase the “what if this person did this” phase. Or I might jot down a few notes about a possible story, to find the story feels dead in my imagination. That death of the story can be quick, as quick as me noticing the idea, only to have it fade into nothing. Most of my ideas are fragile things that never survive discovery. Those wispy scraps of “what if” that float through our brains. ![]() So in the spirit of sharing, here is how I turn my ideas into stories. Maybe we try out this other technique and learn it doesn’t work for us. Maybe we add a new technique to our writer toolkit. But! I do believe it’s useful to share our approaches with each other. ![]() We each find the approach that works best for us, and for the project at hand. As I said in my last post, not all writing advice works for all writers. ![]()
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