Plan-tastic!

Pick up any book or magazine or journal focused on writing, and at least part of the subject matter will deal with strategies to plot a piece, but I’ve never placed a great deal of stock in many of the super-structured methods described. (I’ve never doubted their value, but I’ve never felt the need to integrate them into my work.)

I’m a seat-of-the-pants writer: I get some type of idea and go with it without spending a great deal of time concerning myself with where it goes or whether or not it actually gets someplace. This has been relatively successful for me in terms of where I’ve been with my writing.

It’s one of the beauties of my not being a full-time writer: I have the luxury of writing for the sake of writing, and if what I begin fizzles out, I’m not really any worse off because of it.

But I want to write full time, and I’m realistic enough to know the job of writing full time means there can’t be much fizzle when it comes to putting words on paper.

This is not to say I expect everything I write to work or to sell or to please me, but I’ve been giving a good deal of thought to my seat-of-the-pants approach as I visualize the moment I can quit my day job and focus on my writing, and I’m intelligent enough to know I’m going to need to learn to write with a greater degree of organization while retaining the joy of letting a story and its characters have their (necessary) share of control.

There simply won’t be time in my upcoming, full-time writing life to let things meander and fizzle: I intend to have deadlines (and a good many of them) whether self-imposed or by virtue of a contract.

I’ve begun the transition by making certain I submit at least one piece each month to a contest or publication. Because these are shorter works, it’s been an ideal way for me to begin the process of balancing my whims with a plan. At a once-per-month pace, I simply don’t have as much time to meander: I have to have a solid idea and work on fleshing it out before it turns to mush and too much time and effort have been invested in a piece that never had a chance in my hands.

Enter Holly Lisle’s Clinic Series which covers plot building, character building, language building, and culture building.

I’ve read and heard a lot about Holly Lisle lately: it seems most of the writer-owned sites I frequent rave about her clinic books as well as her fiction, so I wandered over to Lisle-land to see what all the fuss was about.

It’s taken me about a month to look through the vast array of stuff she’s made available to readers and writers and other passersby, and it’s been time well spent.

She also does something I applaud: she offers free previews of her work, and because of this, I downloaded and tried Holly Lisle's Create a Plot Clinic and Holly Lisle's Create a Character Clinic. The previews are substantial: forty pages and three chapters, respectively, and these freeviews resulted in my purchasing both books.

(I likely would still be considering their purchase had the freeviews not been available—even with all of the positive feedback I’ve heard.)

Which brings me to my point: I’m currently working through the “Tools” section of Holly Lisle's Create a Plot Clinic, and I already see how the strategy she describes in the book is going to help with the story I’ve been bouncing around in my head.

Like my other ideas, this one came to me as a basic premise with a very clearly defined scene during which the protagonist and antogonist meet. The old me would have simply thought the scene through until it became agonizing not to write it—two to three weeks at the most—and that me would have taken the plunge and written whatever came while caring little about where it went until I felt it was a “story.” (I want to emphasize this me did not simply let things go: she is good at tracking a great many elements in her head and can generally take a basic premise such as this to at least 20,000 words with little story-building effort. From there, she decides whether it was meant to be a short and cuts and edits and adds and such; or she decides it’s a novel, and she fleshes out and adds and edits and such. Occasionally, she has 20,000 words that lend themselves to nothing more, and that is what the new me wants to avoid.)

The new me has thought this thing through, but she is going to build her plot as described in Holly Lisle's Create a Plot Clinic, and she is going to flesh out her characters as described in Holly Lisle's Create a Character Clinic, and then she is going to release the hounds.

In the meantime, the hounds are feeding on the submission deadlines; although, they now have to take the time to order their meals.