Semi-pantsing

 One of the series I've absolutely fallen in love with over the last couple of years is Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries.  Murderbot is a construct, half-robot and half-human.  And he has a very distinctive personality.  He has full emotions but spends most of his time denying them.  The books are also written in a very distinctive style using first person past tense.

I love using big cats as characters, and I had a what if moment and turned Murderbot into a four-legged lion-based construct.  In my story I'm also trying to mimic the style of the Murderbot books by adopting the same first person past tense storytelling style.

But of course, I still need an original plot for my story, and here's where I've made a radical change.  When I write a novel I'm a detailed planner.  I have a worked out chapter plan with details of who does what when and where before I start to write the story.  But with the fantasy novella I wrote in November I adopted a much looser style of planning, and I thought I'd do the same with this novella too.

Back in November I'd been reading Syd Field's screenwriting books, and I decided to use his three-act template for my novella.  It's useful because, as well as detailing the three acts, he introduces the idea of plot points and a midpoint.  And the structure is based on his analysis of successful films, so it's a framework that works.

Plot point one occurs around 30% of the way through a story.  The plot point is something which turns the story around in a new direction.  The second act is the middle of the story, roughly twice the length of act one.  Syd Field identified a midpoint in films, an event which divides act two into two halves.  At the end of act two is the second plot point, which again takes the story off in another direction.

Using this structure for my new novella, I planned out the rough storyline.  And by rough I mean one page of outline notes.  In theory it seemed fine, but when I started to write the story I realised the events in the outline weren't enough.  My story was in danger of being too short.  I would need to add more events to make the story long enough.

So I've added a scene in act one where my main character has to undergo a medical procedure which might kill her. That adds a lot of tension, and adds words to the story which bring me to plot point one at the right place.  And my character undergoing that surgery meant I could add something extra to the confrontation in the first act which would otherwise have killed my main character.

I'm now writing act two, and I've realised that, again, my very rough outline of events was far too short for the word count I need.  So I've added in complications to the rescue of the captives.  I've split the captives into two groups and put them into two different locations.  They have to be taken out of the underground facility through two different exits, and that gives me more opportunities for them to get locked in and chased. 

But having done that, I needed something grander for the supreme ordeal, the final grand conflict.  So I'll be bringing back the spaceship that dropped off the people my character has rescued and having a battle between two spaceships.

I've decided to call this style of writing semi-pantsing,  I do have an outline before I start, so I'm not creating the story completely out of the dark.  But as I've found with this novella, my first idea will probably not survive the reality of the writing, and I'll have to be prepared to re-plan part way through.  It's an interesting challenge, but so far it's working well.