Writing Without Overplanning: How?

Question

I've been trying to write a book for months, but I never finish planning it. I'm afraid of writing without having what I need ready, and the story taking many different directions, and in the end, I don't even know where I'm going. By the way, an author said that this happens a lot with beginner writers because they haven't structured the story, so they don't know where they want to go. Should I plan the whole story before I start writing, or develop it as I go? How do I balance planning with writing? I want to know how to balance this without losing the story or wasting time just planning. What proportion of planning versus writing works best? What would be the best writing process?

Answer 1

Both planning / outlining and discovery writing / pantsing can result in good books. You have to try what works best for you. The problem you seem to have is that you want to make sure your first book is perfect. You are afraid of failure. And that fear is holding you back and making it impossible to find out what works best for you.

When you are a learner, in whatever field, you have to have the courage to experiment and try out, what works and what doesn't. If you want to learn the violin, you don't expect to pick it up for the first time and play like a master. Why do people always expect to write a book for the first time and that it will be a masterpiece? It very likely won't. And that's not a problem at all, but the normal course of things when you learn to write.

I tried both discovery writing and outlining, and both have their advantages and their disadvantages. By writing many failed books I have eventually found a procedure that works for me. So just write your book already! Stop overthinking it and asking for advice on every small detail. Write it, get feedback, maybe revise it, and then write the next book. And with each book you can try a slightly different approach, until you have found out what works for you.

I can really recommend doing something like NaNoWriMo (that is, writing 50,000 words in one month). It's a liberating experience (even though it will probably result in a manuscript that is a total mess).

Answer 2

Frame Challenge

Writing is a skill which we learn by doing.

The analogy is playing tennis, or any other sport, or musical instrument. You must practice to learn. You must DO the activity to become skilled at the activity.

Writing is NOT a single book – that is the result of a lot of writing.

The analogy is competing at Wimbledon, or playing a major stadium.... That's an aspiration, sure.... But take the pressure off? That endgoal is a ways away.

Work on the skill first – that's how you eventually get to the big arena.

answers for your rhetorical questions

Should I plan the ̶w̶h̶o̶l̶e̶ ̶ story before I start writing, or develop it as I go?

Both. There is no 'or'. false dichotomy is false

How do I balance planning with writing?

By doing both

I want to know how to balance this without losing the story or wasting time just planning.

That's the literal meaning of 'balance'.

What proportion of planning versus writing works best?

Balanced.

What would be the best writing process?

Balanced. Plan a story AND develop as you write. False dichotomy is still false.

Games we play to avoid writing a book

Generating new ideas is endless fun. We can world-build and imagine and never commit to any single idea.

But that doesn't write a book.

Thinking about making a structure is not the same as making a structure. Structure is a solid thing that provides shape and support. Pretend structure doesn't do that, it's a morphing cloud that has no permanent form. Pretend structure can't support anything.

Books are words written on a page. You must write in order to get to that endgoal.

You must commit to SOMETHING: a character, a situation, a direction... in order to start. You need at least ONE IDEA that you can organize around.

• character disillusion/growth arc
• rise and fall/tragedy/competition
• idea/solve a problem/mystery
• right a wrong/injustice/revenge
• situation bad-to-worse/horror/comedy
• adventure in a strange and wondrous place
• bash action figures together, pew-pew-pew

This organizing idea is not just a flippant writing prompt or genre trope. It's ultimately something personal that keeps you (as a writer) coming back for more. The book (this book, any book) is worth writing because it keeps coming back to a core idea, something you believe in, something you are willing to be the champion of. You will try a lot of ideas, but ultimately some 'stick'. You find you actually enjoy writing about it because you believe in it. (it takes time, it's a skill)

But by having a plan – SOME plan – to guide your initial direction, you can start writing. In the process of writing, you can (and will) adjust and improve the plan.

The lie that Pantsers say

There is no difference in plotters and discovery writers. Both follow plans. Both discover as they write.

Pantsers like to claim that plotters decide every word and emotion in advance. The WHOLE story is somehow finished before writing a single word, LOL.

The corollary against discovery writing would be that pantsers cannot have ANY plan, cannot use ANY formula or structure, and must never even start with an idea or character. The writing must be automatismic and involuntary, like 'spirit writing'.

In fact don't even read the page as you go because that might be thinking about the plot, you might force a fictitious person to do something they would never do... (and it is totally not the author actually pulling the puppet strings, no it's the characterrrrrr).

To 'discover' anything you must turn off your brain and be completely lost..., like Christopher Columbus.

No 'plotter' actually says this. It's idiotic.

But don't plotters write every single word before writing the book?
No, that's called WRITING THE BOOK.

A plotter's notes/outline/timeline are just a simplified model of the story (or some part of the story). "All models are wrong, but some are useful." Don't mistake a map for the actual territory. Plotters still 'discover' while writing the actual book. The model or map is just an idea, maybe the goal, but not the actual road.

Plotters still have to put words on the page, they just don't weirdly brag about how they made a conscious effort to think about what they want to say before grabbing a pen and spirit writing stream-of-conscious emotional blather from their id.

They also have the OPTION of seeing where the story on the page is going, checking if that was the original idea, and then (gasp) make a conscious decision what to do about it.

Why would I be a slave to an outline that I wrote? I can change the outline, OR I can correct my scene direction. I get to make the BETTER choice. Discovery AND plotting. Win/Win.

The reality is that writing is having some ideas and getting them on the page, and there is always a process of editing and organizing and re-writing NO MATTER HOW YOU CALL IT.

Anything less is un-finished.

Answer 3

There are two kind of opposite approaches professionals use for writing, with some blending in-between. Plotting, and Discovery.

A plotter devises the entire plot of the story first; all the twists and turns, the mistakes, etc. They develop a detailed outline of what is going to happen in each Act, and then create detailed character "bio" and follow their own instruction to turn this outline into chapters, the four major parts (Act I, Act IIa, Act IIb, Act III).

A discovery writer (like me, like Stephen King) takes the opposite approach. They begin with characters and no plot, just a situation. What if a young girl was kidnapped by extraterrestrials, and for some reason escaped captivity and was wandering the alien ship? What would she find? What would she do?

I don't know if if E.T. was discovery written, but it plays like it might have been: What if an extraterrestrial scientist was left behind on Earth? What would happen?

Or in Stephen King's The Stand; what if 99.9% of the world died due to a virus? What would the survivors do? What types of people would survive? Civilization and tech would end; but how would they find each other? King answered these questions in his own way; I would write a much different story, and so would you.

From the "What If" question, then the discovery writer moves on to characters. In E.T., we must define E-T and his personality, the writer chose to use the military to hunt E-T, non-threatening children to discover E-T and eventually help him "go home".

King chose a common-man can-do good ol' boy to begin the story with, (but eventually a cast of several dozen).

For the discovery writer, plot is a shadow issue. There has to be a plot; but it isn't exactly planned out -- The characters stay true to themselves, and do what they do, and as King says (in his book "On Writing", which I highly recommend) "The story comes out somewhere."

The only real rule you have to follow is that your characters cannot stall. They must keep moving, they cannot give up. They will succeed or die. They cannot move in circles. Their situation must change, by their effort or by the villain's effort or by nature's effort until they resolve the central problem.

Speaking of which, in the first Act, halfway through, we will have an Inciting Incident, a problem for the protagonist they feel like they have to solve; or are literally forced to solve (e.g. E.T. gets abandoned, or a pilot crashes in the desert, without communications, and must find a way back to civilization.)

I strongly recommend becoming familiar with the 3 Act Structure; which divides a story into basically 8 equal parts (16 in some formulations).

As a Discovery Writer, I use this as a guide to the type of writing I should be doing. The first half of the first Act (1/8th of the story; say Act I.a) is dedicated to describing the "Normal World" for the protagonist. At the end of that, the Inciting Incident occurs -- a problem for the protagonist.

In Act I.b; as the protagonist attempts to solve the problem, it gets worse. It grows or changes somehow. By the end of Act I.b, the problem has gotten so bad the protagonist must leave their Normal world, either physically or mentally/emotionally, in order to solve the problem.

That "leaving" can be metaphorical; say an accounting discrepancy leads her to no longer trusts her boss; suspects he is engaged in criminal activity (oh she has no idea how much!)

Or it can be literal, Dorothy is swept by a tornado out of her normal world trying to save Toto, and is forced out of her Normal world into Oz, and goes on a journey to get back to her normal world.

But for me the 3AS is not a planning device, more of a compass pointing at the end of the story -- it is the TYPE of writing I should be doing; escalation and complications, failures or successes or resolutions or wrapping up.

In the hybrid category, you may have some final target you wish to achieve. Say for a movie; E.T. is going to have a happy ending; E-T will go home and Elliot and the kids will not be punished.

I typically aim for happy endings; they just sell better -- but horror writers often have unhappy endings that still sell blockbusters.

My problem with Plotting, when I began, was that after devising the plot, I was drained of enthusiasm for the story. Writing felt like a chore, and even then my characters felt increasingly wooden, forced to do things I felt like were not in their character; that they wouldn't do, but that is what the plot required.

For me, my characters take on their own personality as I write them, their thinking and actions. That works with Discovery writing, in fact once I "discover" who they are as people, I always go back to the beginning and make sure they are "in character" from the start.

I will warn you that Discovery writing is often about rewrite, as your plot ideas develop through your writing, you will often go back and rewrite earlier scenes to include foreshadowing, or to make sure your new plot twist is supported by the earlier chapters.

At least for me, Discovery writing is the only way I can write novels or screenplays. Plotting bores me; it is easier for me to hold a dozen characters in my mind and let them do what they will as situations arise, and let the story goes where it would with these people collectively forcing it forward to some conclusion. (Then I go back and rewrite to streamline that route and save some space).

Maybe you are a Discovery writer, and approaching this story writing business with a tactic that doesn't suit how you write.