There are usually two kinds of writers: Planners and Pantsers.
A "Pantser" writes by the seat of their pants, meaning they make it up as they go along. This works fine for freewriting and is generally something that you would do for shorter works of fiction.
However, when fiction gets a little longer, this form of planning... lack of planning... usually results in the story breaking and for those that manage to fix it, generally results in plot holes.
So even people who like to make things up as they go, need to form some sort of overarching plan that guides their writing sessions from place to place.
When writing a Chain Story, as @lex-zaiya and myself write, we have a mostly writing by the seat of our pants style because that is where the challenge comes in. We do, however, need to discuss possibilities and often we communicate to make clear what was our intention when we wrote some sore of half-revealed truth to keep the audience guessing.
So as shown above it seems that it is essential to have at least SOME menthod to plan out the story out. I have done this and this does, by no means take away the magic of writing. But it DOES make sure that you do not completely waste your time on doing hundreds of hours of writing only to have massive plot holes in the story or to just get stumped, uninspired and eventually give up.
Snowflake Method
There is a 10 step snowflake method to planning Fiction stories.
When I first used it, I followed it religiously.
These days I do not use it as much.
Esentially the first few steps is to write a sentance, a paragraph and then a page with 3-5 paragraphs explaining your book's story to yourself.
You then focus on characters, what drives them? There are sometimes Physical Goals as well as emotional motivations. There are usually something that gets in their way and there is usually some sort of growth or revelation, some sort of character epiphany and this causes the character to grow.
Once you have these down it is up to you how much more planning you need to do. Each Paragraph above can be turned into a page each and that in turn can build a whole framework of all the scenes you need to write. Once you are writing you can just focus on the actual writing of the scene. You already know where you are going and you do not need to worry about the plot breaking as you go along.
Additionally, for the characters, you could create a detailed file for each main and influential characters to detail everything you might want to know or establish about a character.
This would help you understand your characters as you might a friend you have known for a long time and from this point, when dropping this character into situations with other characters almost makes it as though the characters have a mind of their own.
"If that character is with another character, of course they would do this and say that." Is the sort of thing that happens to you.
It is up to you how far you take planning, but never let it becoem such a big task that you never get any writing done!
Book of Space Lore
I need to APPLY a planning method to the story of Space Lore to get it written and finished.
I used to write this as a Chain Story with my friend @therneau but he has not been able to write in a while.
So while I have both reigns in my hands I am going to show this whole technique of planning in the case scenario of the Book of Space Lore.
This will be a retro-active method as I will need to get back into the story and create a future for the characters. I will need to create a glossary of terms and character names and races and do some world building from what has been written because:
Chainstory Golden Rule: Once it is written, it is now canon!
I need to be able to work with what has been put down. "Play it as it is!"
So... next stop is for me to take 3 (or 2-4 depending on length) of the parts of Space Lore and read them and start building an analysis and synopsis.
This is a good time for new readers to join in the fun as I go through the parts and explore what needs to be explored!
So...
Coming up
A Review of the first three parts will happen!
Links to those parts here:
Once I have read these and put together a synopsis and a character sheet of characters mentioned in those posts, I will write a post and then add in the next bit until I am up to date!
Thank you for joining me in this journey!
Thank you for reading!
Cheers!
@zakludick
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