To plan, or not
I'm starting to work out the plot for the third book in the Panthera series, to be titled Panthera : Death Plain. It will be set on Earth, and that brings my characters back to where they started from.
With the Panthera books I wanted a crisp, thriller-type writing style. I have multi-viewpoints, and I wanted each new viewpoint to pick up the story thread and add the next piece. I wasn't confident that I would pull that off if I didn't plan the novel in a fair degree of detail before I started to write.
Writers fall into two camps. There are those that plan, and those that don't, before they start writing. In my early career I didn't plan. My novel Jade was written from a five line story idea. The book works fine, but it is told in one viewpoint and that makes things a lot easier. As I've moved to multi-viewpoint stories I've found the need for planning has increased.
For Panthera : Death Song I produced a detailed chapter breakdown before I started to write. But as I wrote I found it didn't cover everything the story needed. Often I hadn't thought about linking that section of narrative to the one immediately before it and I needed to write a bridging scene. I also realised that I'd missed opportunities to put in cliffhangers at the end of chapters. Often that meant I had to shift some of the information in my chapter plan to the start of the next chapter in that character's viewpoint.
What I've discovered is that, even when I have a detailed chapter plan, I need to stay flexible and open to new opportunities to improve the text. So I guess for me, the ideal way to work is to plan, but be willing to change the plan if a better idea arises while I'm writing.
In Death Plain I need to pick up some of the story threads I left dangling in Death Spiral. I'm finding the best way to work at this first stage of planning is to write individual incidents and scenes onto index cards. When I have all my major ideas I can then divide them up between the characters and write my chapter plan. I'm planning on having four viewpoints in Death Plain: Ren, her two brothers, and Pan. I don't think Felis is going to make another appearance, but you never know. Perhaps the Muses will have other ideas and my careful planning will go out the window again.
With the Panthera books I wanted a crisp, thriller-type writing style. I have multi-viewpoints, and I wanted each new viewpoint to pick up the story thread and add the next piece. I wasn't confident that I would pull that off if I didn't plan the novel in a fair degree of detail before I started to write.
Writers fall into two camps. There are those that plan, and those that don't, before they start writing. In my early career I didn't plan. My novel Jade was written from a five line story idea. The book works fine, but it is told in one viewpoint and that makes things a lot easier. As I've moved to multi-viewpoint stories I've found the need for planning has increased.
For Panthera : Death Song I produced a detailed chapter breakdown before I started to write. But as I wrote I found it didn't cover everything the story needed. Often I hadn't thought about linking that section of narrative to the one immediately before it and I needed to write a bridging scene. I also realised that I'd missed opportunities to put in cliffhangers at the end of chapters. Often that meant I had to shift some of the information in my chapter plan to the start of the next chapter in that character's viewpoint.
What I've discovered is that, even when I have a detailed chapter plan, I need to stay flexible and open to new opportunities to improve the text. So I guess for me, the ideal way to work is to plan, but be willing to change the plan if a better idea arises while I'm writing.
In Death Plain I need to pick up some of the story threads I left dangling in Death Spiral. I'm finding the best way to work at this first stage of planning is to write individual incidents and scenes onto index cards. When I have all my major ideas I can then divide them up between the characters and write my chapter plan. I'm planning on having four viewpoints in Death Plain: Ren, her two brothers, and Pan. I don't think Felis is going to make another appearance, but you never know. Perhaps the Muses will have other ideas and my careful planning will go out the window again.
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