Pant’sers and planners.
Every writer tends to be a little along the line of a pant’ser. You’re writing by the seat of your pants.
“What happens next?” “Won’t know till I write it!”
But if you want your book to succeed and get finished, you’re going to have to plan it. Otherwise, you end up with what Jerry Jenkins calls the “Maunder of the middle.”
If you want to avoid writer’s block, then planning is also your best friend.
Take your cork board, and on every scene, write a brief one or two sentence synopsis on it. If you’re using the 30 chapter template, put it ABOVE the summary that’s already there. That way you see what it has to say, PLUS how you plan to do it.
“Quint buys piano strings.”
“Hooper loses the tooth.”
“Chief Brody makes faces at his son” Etc.
This step will ensure you don’t get partway through and abandon it.
Two phrases to get in your mind!
Proper planning prevents poor performance.
Writers block only means you have nothing to say.
If you get halfway through a novel (like I just did) and hit a stopping point – you didn’t plan it. There’s two pieces of software that will help – Dramatica (VERY expensive) and Contour. Contour is more aimed at writing movies than novels, so you’re kind of stuck, unless you manually do it.
Take your characters, and notate in your research sections the following thoughts.
“How will character A be impacted by Character B?” And so on. Most of the time, the answer will be, “They won’t.”
But there needs to be some interaction between characters. Your protagonist usually has someone who helps them or focuses them, or they change in some way, assisted by the impact character. In the case of detective fiction, not really – but they need someone to hire them to solve (something). That’s your impact character.
So, usually, you’ve got
- Protagonist (hero)
- Antagonist (villain)
- Impact character.
Now, there’s a whole gamut of character archetypes that you can use. The Wanderer, the teacher, the wise man, the mystic, the fool, the dropout, the thief, etc. I’m really not going to go into all that here. Other people have done that research, and since I haven’t, I’d be plagiarizing. If you’re interested, then study that.
Suffice it to say, you should know what’s going to happen in every chapter, every scene. You need to know how to get to Scene 16 from 15. If you know all this, plan it out. Your book will write itself VERY quickly.
How quickly?
Two months.
