Having been working fairly intensely the last few days on fleshing out the plot for lovejunky I’m becoming acutely aware of the potential conflict that any writer faces in relation to just letting the plot of a story go where it takes you as opposed to sculpting it in a certain direction in order to appeal more to any potential audience. This becomes more apparent when/if the end product may well end up being published.
It could be a more worthy-sounding response for a writer, an artist like any other, to want to remain true to the story and to just let it go where it pleases and for the most part this is what I’ve done in the past. You come up with a starting point, maybe you know roughly which direction it will go in or maybe not, but either way you let the story unravel. I tend to have ideas which form plot points, like dots on a piece of paper, which are then joined up to create the overall shape of the story. I might not know exactly how those joins will be made to begin with and occasionally the dots just refuse to meet up and some have to be discarded or reshaped but for the most part they do all join up.
But part of the fun of the writing process if figuring out how and where you can improve the story. For some this could be only done as part of the editing process but for others it might be done from the get-go. Having worked out a rough plot structure for lovejunky I now find myself looking at it thinking “is this the best way for things to happen?” I start to look at the balance of the story – does it take too long to get going? Does the first sentence or two grab the reader? Should I start at a slightly different point and then work backwards if need be?
I don’t see it as a negative thing being aware of what the audience or potential publishers might want – often massaging the story ever so slightly is all it takes. Certainly I’ll often be reading or watching something and it’s just not working for me. The pieces are all there but the pacing is too slow or the flow is uneven, the shape is all wrong. If I’m aware of this when consuming other people’s work then there’s no reason to think that people reading what I can come up with won’t aware too. So sure it’s only sensible to be aware of this and change the plot to suit?
Plot is my mortal enemy, oh gosh. I never have anything more than a vague sense of “this should go here” or “maybe that’ll work”.
That said – I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to have your reader in the back of your mind. Creating something boring or slow or lackluster, no matter what it has in it that you love, just won’t work out.
It’s a fine balance, I suppose.
I’m exactly the opposite in terms of how much I know about the plot before I start writing, at least for novel length stuff. I like to have at least the skeleton planned out before I even write a single sentence and then flesh out the upcoming scenes just ahead of them needing to be written – kind of like a racetrack being constructed just as the cars arrive to fly over it!
I realise that this is possibly a minority approach, certainly from what I’ve read about how others do it, but it works for me. Although it means when I write any scene it’s technically just a process which I go through automatically as I’ve already done the thinking for it, I wonder if this frees me up slightly to be able to put the bulk of my concentration into constructing nice flowing sentences, structure and dialogue since I don’t need to be putting it into figuring out what is actually needing to happen in the scene?
I would much prefer to have everything sort of planned out before I tackle it, because, I think you’re right in that. It sort of frees you up to say what you want to say in the way you want to say it, or at least, be able to concentrate only on that. I’ve never been very good at plot, so this time around for my latest project, I am trying *extra* hard to plot out everything in advance so I just have to, well, do the actual wording after the fact.
IT ALSO SOUNDS A HECK OF A LOT EASIER! And much less of a struggle.
Well I guess whatever works best for you is the way to go – as long as you produce something which you are proud of and happy with then it doesn’t matter how you got there.
I think that part of the reason I flesh things out so much in advance is that I don’t get as much time to write as I like so it means that when I do get some time and sit down at my computer I don’t have to spend as long thinkng about what needs to happen in the scene so I can generally get it done more quickly. I guess, though, the downside is that by creating a fairly rigid structure it could mean that story is more restricted in terms of how it can develop organically.