January 31, 2008 | writing
Leo asked, in the comments to the below post:
When you’re working on a new book, do you work on a character sketch and a complete synopsis first? Or just go ahead and start writing and see where the character takes you having a general idea in your head of what type of person you’re writing about?
I really really wish I could write a complete synopsis before I began. It would help me so much and most likely make me a much less neurotic person. But I generally only have a vague idea of what will happen before I begin. I usually know up to about chapter four (with Girl from Mars it’s chapter seven, so that’s pretty good). Of course with a romance you know the heroine and hero will get together, but I usually have very little idea of how.
I will have one or two ideas of things that should happen, generally big set-piece scenes or scenes that are inevitable (for example, in Delicious at the end of the competition they’ve been training for, or the wedding in Married in a Rush, or when Eleanor goes into labour in One Night Stand). But I won’t know where they’re going to end up in the book. Generally the plot is a big vague cloud.
I do develop my characters a good deal before I begin to write, though usually that’s just the main character(s) and the secondaries develop themselves. After a chapter or two I need to stop and refine my ideas of all the characters, according to how they’ve come to life in what I’ve written (because they do that by themselves). For example in what I’ve written recently for Girl from Mars, I originally saw the heroine’s friend Digger as rather clueless. But as he’s done and said more, I’ve realised he’s one of the wisest characters in the book. So I have to revise my character sketches (and the first few pages of the book) accordingly.
But I generally do have a good working knowledge of my character before I start to write.
I know everyone does this differently and there is no single “right” way to write a book. What do you do?
Leonie Smith says:
Complete synopsis? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! *takes deep breath* BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I just seem to have a bunch of ideas over a course of time and then once they start to take a vague shape, I throw them at a page and see what sticks and what else comes along. My current work-in-progress began in several different parts; the prologue began as a short story and the first half began as a series of blog posts that mutated and turned into a monster, BWAHAHAHAHA!
Sorry, I’ll stop laughing like a maniac now. But sometimes writing makes me feel like a mad professor building Frankenstein’s monster!
Jessica Raymond says:
I used to plot really intricately — literally, down to the number of scenes in a chapter. But I found it really spoiled my enthusiasm and fire for the book, because when I came to writing it was almost as if, well, I’d already written it.
Like you, I now have a starting scene, an ending, and a rough idea of what might happen in the middle. I’ve learned that knowing your characters is the key to writing the book. You can’t force them to do things when you don’t know them very well (and when it might turn out that they are things those characters would never do). So as long as you have an idea of the story you want to tell and you know the people who are going to live it, it should all stem from there.
That being said, though, I always feel like somebody else is doing it better
Phillipa says:
Julie.
I started off Decent Exposure which no real idea where I was heading (although it was my very first attempt at a novel so I had no idea of anything, full stop.) My inexperience resulted in endless rewriting, tears and tens of thousands of scrapped words. I was more disciplined with WYWH but with my last two LBDs I have planned out a very detailed synopsis after a couple of months of ‘thinking’ time. That was the ed’s (ahem) advice and it’s worked for me. The last two books have been tighter and more structured. It comforts me to know that I have plenty of plot/action/conflict planned for the whole book. I write really tightly so I need a lot happening.
Like you, as the characters develop, they take their own path to the end, but I do stick to the overall framework.
Then again, it often all goes horribly pear shaped!
Phillipa says:
MTA Jess - I *always* think everyone is doing it a lot better than me.
Leo says:
Thanks Julie and everyone who commented. I’m really relieved to know that I’m not the only one who can’t see past chapter three until I’m actually writing it :0)