keeping a loose rein

 As I’ve said before, I’ve become a planner of my novels in recent years.  But that planning only extends to knowing what the main action is in each scene, and which character is viewpoint for it.

My plan is an outline for each chapter.  It tells me who does what roughly, and it sets me free to write the chapter because I always know the bare bones of the story. That way, I never suffer from writer’s block.  But there are many things which that outline doesn’t cover at all.

One is backstory,  As I discussed in last week’s blog post, backstory sometimes needs to be detailed if it drives the story.  And that’s certainly the case in the novel I’m rewriting now.  The backstory I’m adding there is about character pasts.  It’s things I didn’t know about my characters until I sat down to write that chapter.  

At the start of the novel I have two characters operating under false identities. I knew the reason why one of them did that, but the other one I had no idea.  As I was writing about him, a scene where two brothers were disagreeing about making art commercial popped into my head.  I later discovered that the quarrel had escalated into one brother threatening to kill the other.

Now that character’s flight from his home world, and his operating under a false name, made sense.  I’d already had another character wondering why this man has the headquarters of a vast interstellar company empire based on a grimy shipyard.  This new backstory made sense of that.  If the character is hiding from his brother, he might well base his companies in a place his brother wouldn’t think to look for him.

I also had a revelation about my AI character’s previous captains pop up when I was writing about him watching a body being taken to a mortuary.  I suddenly had him tell me about a captain of his who’d died at the age of thirty, leaving the AI devastated by his loss.  This hadn’t been planned at all.

For me, my chapter plan acts like a loose rein.  It sets the direction for the story, and it tells me what has to happen within it.  But as I write, something much richer and deeper winds itself around the bare bones of the plot set out there.

Yesterday I wrote about a character backstage at a rock concert, and as I wrote I had the titles of the band’s songs suggested to me.  I also learned what the superstar did with his money.  He puts it into conservation.

There is a balance between uncovering the story basics in my chapter plan and staying flexible to allow creative insights to suggests themselves.  I’ve honed the process to the stage where it works really well now.  I have the perfect balance of pre-planning and serendipitous discovery in my process, and I’m pleased with what I’m currently producing.