The Plotting Soup

The most difficult writing question I was ever asked was at a party at Romance Writers of America annual meeting, three years ago.

Like that, out of the blue and without anesthesia, a fellow writer turns to me and asks, “So, are you a plotter or a pantser?” There was a small ring of people nearby, listening. And I froze badly.

Finally I managed to blurt the truth which was “Yes.” And when people proceeded to tell me that was impossible (ah!) other people said “I think that’s more common than people admit.”

To make things clear, though, if the plotters and the pantsers were enemy clans, I’d stand and fight with the plotters (except I never would because my friend Kate is on the other side, and frankly that’s one scary woman to fight with.)

I’d stand with the plotters, because I need the structure and the support. Think of my plotting as a map, but not on a GPS or at least not on a GPS that’s been updated in the last three years. Or perhaps it’s a map of Portuguese roads, where often a beautiful unconcern prevails about the common details of road turns and intersections. After all, a road with fewer, larger intersections looks better on the map, and surely you’re not such a ninny that you won’t realize you can get to the larger cross street by taking that alley over there, so tight that the mirrors of your car will scrape the walls….

I’d still need a map to get anywhere – children, I need a map to find my way around my living room, such my sense of direction – but you can’t trust it when you come to the fine work.

So I start writing with something like twenty to fifty pages outline (these days, usually, handwritten, but when I needed to send in detailed outlines to sell, they used to get typed up.)

And then I take that outline and pin it up somewhere, take one of my legal notepads (I buy a package of this per month or so. If I amount to anything, when I die, I wish my biographer good luck. Into these goes everything and anything from plot notes, to notes about character appearance, to phone numbers of whoever I needed to talk to while writing. Sometimes finding someone’s phone number involves going “So, what was I writing, at that time?”) ) and plot more finely and usually for the next ten chapters.

Say the first movement of the novel is “Nell sets off on her ship to the lands beyond the sea” (I’d like to insert a disclaimer that this character, these lands and this ship exist only for the purpose of the example. Please don’t get attached to them and demand I write them!)

In my head, it might have been clear that the book started before Nell went off. I need to have the reason she’s pushed off her native land, wherever that is. Say a messenger comes and tells her that her younger brother, Giles is about to be hanged for piracy. She must go free him.

So in the notebook, the chapters get outlined in bullet points, somewhat like this:

1 – Nell receives messenger telling her that Giles is about to be hanged for piracy in the distant and terrible city of Leoniba, where her older brother also met his end.

2- Nell’s decision to go rescue Giles, and argument with Mira who does not want to be left in charge of the house – and who might wish Giles dead so she can remarry.

3 – Convincing Michael to captain her ship. He’s none too sure she should leave the trading house in Mira’s hands and besides he’s not sure he wants a woman on board giving orders.

4 – Nell uses Michael’s secret to blackmail him into captaining her ship.

As I write them, sometimes the chapters mutate slightly, still, or have “kittens.” Say 2– Nell might see a man leaving Mira’s chambers and run after him to find out who he is. He might be Michael’s brother Steven, which then gets used in chapter 4.

By the time I’m ten chapters in, I usually need to write the next series of chapter bullet points. By then I’ve come across an intersection that wasn’t in that general and imprecise map, or I have a wild hankering to go see if there’s a castle beyond that hill on the side – metaphorically speaking. The plot has deviated enough from the written one that more chapters might be needed to keep the story on course, generally speaking.

It is very rare – though it has happened a few times – that the story deviates so much that I end up somewhere different than where I set out to be and/or that I don’t hit the major plot points I planned along the way.

On the other hand I’ve never written anything that doesn’t deviate and take excursions of brief to medium duration. Or that a character meant to be a villain isn’t after all a very flawed hero. (Or vice versa.) Mira, for instance, might have been trying to rescue her husband herself, intends to set off on a ship captained by Steve, and doesn’t want to manage the house while Nell is gone. That’s all right. It means an extra dramatic confrontation at the end, and the women fighting side by side to rescue Giles, but the part of the plotline that says “They fight the bad guys” is still the same.

You’re probably wondering why I do this the most complicated way possible. Well… there are two reasons. The first one is that if I don’t plot at all, with my attention span, I tend to go haring off over every hint, clue and bit of interest that drops into the soup.

Nell would see someone come out of Mira’s chambers, the someone would go by a jeweler. Nell would go into the jewelers and find the diamond that belonged to her grandmother. Talking to the jeweler she’d find the diamond is actually the twin of her grandmothers. It has magical properties and was given to her great aunt, who–

Even if I get back to the story ten chapters later (and I probably would because I’d have in my head the story is Nell rescues her brother) for the first ten chapters, this would have been a book about magical diamonds. By the time I snap back to ships and rescuing brothers, the reader is likely to get whiplash or a broken neck.

On the other hand, if all I have is the very general outline, which does keep me on track, I have trouble imagining the story in enough detail to be interesting. I don’t know how to explain this, but my first approach to a story is always as though I’m floating above it. I need to pull myself close enough to even see what’s going on, and then I can decide where to drop in and which alleys to describe, which cobblestones to walk, etc. If I try to write directly from the general outline, you get something like “Nell walked down to the wharf and hailed the first ship she came to. “Hey,” she said. “I want to sail to Leowhatever where my brother is going to be hanged for being a pirate.” It won’t even read like an outline. It will read like insanity.

Except, since my subconscious has fail safe mechanisms to keep me from being terminally stupid, what ends up happening is that I actually can’t write at all. I stare at the general plot and at the keyboard for days on end. (This sometimes happens when I try to do it. Why do I try to do it? Because I’m terminally stupid. Or can’t find a legal notepad.) I moan, yell, sob, and make all my friends consider offing me rather than putting up with my nonsense. And then I get a legal notepad and plot in bullet points.

So, have I always plotted this way? No. Only since about Draw One In The Dark.

The problem is that, before that, I had the general outline, then sort of forced myself to write from that, then went back and ruthlessly uprooted all deviations and side-excursions.

I’ve told people often enough that it shouldn’t surprise anyone that each of my first three books was actually twice the size it ended up. (For Ill Met probably three times.)

In Draw One In The Dark I plotted via notebook, but still things fell in that weren’t in either outline. And when I was revising I came to the scene with the three guys in the car and considered cutting it out. And then I made a decision to leave it in. It doesn’t advance plot, but it advances character development. Best decision I ever made. I get more fan mail on that scene than on all the rest of the book. Over time, I’ve come realize the scene is essential for character development, I just couldn’t see that in the overarching outline.

And that’s why I decided, since then, to allow things to fall in.

However, the plotting soup is a scary thing. I’m forever in danger of ending up with ten first chapters about diamonds in a book about ships. Hence, I still need the general outline to keep me on track as to where I’m going, why, and which plot points need attention and which can be downplayed.

This later mistake of throwing in everything that crosses your mind is a beginner thing (Guilty as charged with the thing called Mirrorplay, aka the doorstop, which will eventually be a six or so book series.) The problem with it is that you end up dragging the reader in odd directions, until the reader loses all interest. (The other problem is that the book becomes six hundred and fifty five thousand words long, and, in printed form, can be used to insulate a mansion with forty bedrooms.)

My mother used to make a “Whatever” stew, into which she threw whatever leftover meat she had around, whatever veggies were in danger of going bad, and whichever condiments struck her fancy. Note she didn’t throw in grass, a vase of flowers and some fur from the cat just because they were around.

So I let the plotting soup in only with a baster and in controlled circumstances. And generally Nell does get there and rescue her brother.

Will it work for you? Who knows? Worth a try if nothing else does. But whichever way you find to both unlock the subconscious and not let yourself get drowned in the plotting soup, is good.

Just hold on fast to the plotting line, and you’ll come to your destination by and by.