Rigid spontaneity

Yesterday I finished my chapter plan for Panthera : Death Plain, the third book in the Panthera series.  It has 72 chapters, four viewpoints, and a story thread that weaves from one viewpoint to the next.  The story also has to contain references to some of the events in the first book in the series, Panthera : Death Spiral.

I have produced a detailed chapter plan for all three of the books.  I did it for the first book because I knew I needed to keep track of all those viewpoints.  I wanted each character to hand on the story thread like a baton at the end of their viewpoint chapters.  And there was only one way to do that, plan the story out before I started writing.

You might wonder whether this inhibited my writing, having the story so tightly tied down.  It didn't.  What emerged was a kind of rigid spontaneity.  Having finished Death Song, the second book, my chapter plan is now scribbled with lots  of notes where I realised I'd missed opportunities for cliffhangers and shifted chapter ends around.  Instead of killing the spontaneity of the first draft, my detailed chapter plan set me free to create.  I didn't have to worry about where the story was going, I knew.  My job while writing it was to tell it as vividly as I could.

I learned a lot from the changes I made to Death Song's chapter plan.  And for Panthera : Death Plain I've tried to take more notice of the creation of cliffhangers.  The plan got subjected to the same two-stage process as the finished manuscript.  I created it, then I looked at it and edited it to have more impact.

I won't be ready to start writing the book until January, but when I start I can steam ahead in a wave of creativity, knowing that I won't write myself into any dead ends.