A Little Magic, Mayhem, and Love

Hello My Lovelies,

By now we’ve established, I’m a diehard plantser when it comes to my craft. I need an outline, a storyboard, a map if you will. But I also crave flexibility. I don’t want to be so stuck on one path that I miss the twists and turns which make life, and books, fabulous.

Until November and NaNoWriMo I never knew there was a cutesy name for my style of writing. Once I found it, I felt as if light shined down on me from Heaven and I was blessed by whatever higher power you believe in (or don’t believe in for that matter). I embraced this writing method with every fiber of my being, yet I couldn’t explain what it meant to someone else without revealing a little too much about my personal insecurities when it came to my work. Today that changes. Today, I’m opening myself up to criticism, to those who will tell you my methodology is silly, undisciplined, and wrong.

The first novel I wrote I pantsed from beginning to end. I had a general idea of my characters and plot, but I wasn’t set in stone with any of it. I didn’t even do real research for fear of messing up how my characters interacted in word form. I wanted them to be natural, less contrived, and I felt pantsing was the only available option.I may have also had some silly belief that it made me more of an “artiste” and less of a hack who didn’t know what they were doing. You get a general idea. I struggled every day to write that story, believing if I could get the words out the rest would take care of itself in rewrites. I. Was. Horribly. Wrong. I wasn’t just wrong, I was in a black abyss of wrongness from which there was no exit. Nothing could make that story work, character’s names changed without warning (and even I couldn’t tell who was who by the end) my ideas lacked substance when it came to execution, and every word seemed to not fit with the next.

Then when I’d lost all hope of redeeming myself as an author (yes, I’m a bit melodramatic why do you ask?), an ad popped up on my Facebook page for a free course in plotting. Free has two connotations for me. The first is a scam, the second is awful. Maybe I’ve fallen prey to more than my fair share of “free” classes that were less than amazing, but I signed up anyway. Seriously, what could it hurt? I already knew I couldn’t do it by myself. I’d pretty much figured out if it was any good then there would be a better more expensive option offered at the end of the class, and since I didn’t have to sign up for anything I didn’t want I gave it a shot. It was through this eight-week course that I met Shaunta Grimes the original Ninja Writer and my hero. Her Plotting Workshop showed me where I screwed up on my first novel, and gave me the tools to work on my second. I learned how to write an outline, develop realistic characters, etc. It was a game changer for me.

Using Shaunta’s class as my guide, I developed and wrote my novel from start to finish in ten weeks. Four for developing the story and creating my outline, and six for writing the rough draft. I cried when I finished my rough draft feeling as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

In July, I joined Camp NaNoWriMo, and with my handy-dandy outline and storyboard I set out to have another successful completion using Shaunta’s methods. That was the plan at any rate and remained my plan until my characters decided my carefully crafted multi-book story arc mean precisely crap to them. My slow to develop romance was supposed to take two more books, and suddenly my characters are sharing a room and all that entails. Have I mentioned I don’t write sex scenes? Well, that’s not true. I do write sex scenes, I just won’t let anyone read them after I discovered that my characters suddenly seem to develop extra limbs and other body parts. It’s been a slow couple of decades in the sex and romance department, and since I have little current knowledge to rely on so, I feel at this point it’s best to wait put it on my list of things I plan on learning at some time in the future. So there I sit with one carefully written plot, with story arcs galore, and one slightly slow romance developing and instead I have a dragon and a human who have flipped me the proverbial middle finger and decided to get busy without me. The nerve of my characters, how dare they do this to me? After several conversations with my sister and the rest of the Prose Hos, it was decided to allow my characters to let their freak flags fly. I’d stick as close to my script as possible, but adjust whenever my characters decided to make it necessary. Magic happened. My book practically wrote itself. The plot shifted a little, but it’s pretty close to the original intention. Some things sped up, others slowed down, but it all works.

After July, it’s time for me to prep for NaNo. This time, I’m not working on the same series, so I’m not as familiar with the characters. I write every day for thirty days sticking to my outline and developed characters. Wanna know what happened? I. Hated. It. I can’t express how much I hated it, but I hated everything in the story starting with my female main character. She and I just didn’t connect. There was no magic, there was lots of animosity though. I put that story aside, to go back and revise book two and have left it there for nearly eight months I will go back and fix it, but only after I’ve had time to work on character development. This girl’s story deserves to be told and told well.

So now, we’re up to April and another Camp NaNoWriMo. I adore all NaNo events because it pushes me to write faster. I worry less about what I write, and more about letting the story flow. Remember, revisions are perfect for fixing errors and making it shine. I can’t revise until I have a rough draft to work with. So this April, it was time for book three in my series. This time, I planned the plot, started to write, and let my characters show me their real reactions to the events I planned rather than what I felt their reactions should be. The magic was back, I felt like an author again, life was good.

So here’s what I’ve learned in the last eighteen months, planning is fine and dandy for some, pantsing is good for others, but some authors need a little of both. For those writers, a little mayhem helps magic flow. It helps their work shine, and in the end isn’t that why we do this? We writers love our stories, and we want readers to feel the same way. In the end, if we need to create a new way of doing something out of the ways of the past, isn’t that what art is truly about? I’d love to hear your thoughts about it, tell me in the comments.

Until next time,

V. L. Cooke

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