An Email Players subscriber (not sure he wants me naming him) asks about writing fiction:
I’ve been listening to Bandersnatch since you recommended it a few days ago, too… so good, wish I’d followed your recommendation to read it earlier…
My question: You’ve got me thinking about writing a novel. And I wanted to ask you about your experience with it and approach to it…
Specifically about the “grunt work” that goes on behind the scenes…
I’ve been writing since I was a little kid. Studied it at college. And as a copywriter I write 90 minute scripts regularly. So I understand about doing research, organizing and collating ideas, synthesizing, knowing what I want to say and in what order, etc.
But what I have no idea about is the process of plotting and keeping track of everything, and was interested to hear your approach to it.
Do you plot the whole thing out in advance, and build it brick by brick? Do you use a system for tracking all the elements of the story you want to include? Are all the character backstories and how they might react to certain situations… or the way they speak… written down, or do you just track it in your head?
Thanks in advance for any insight you can share or any further recommendations you can provide. Even if it’s just to point me to an EP issue where you covered this and I’ve forgotten.
The book Bandersnatch he mentioned is a perfect book for aspiring novelists, imo.
I’ve read it probably half a dozen times so far.
As far as my answer:
I will be writing an Email Players issue about this eventually. But probably not until after my next series of novels are done or at least well under way. This month I was set to write a new one, and nearly wrote two different novels simultaneously since I could not choose which I wanted to go with. But alas… I got sidetracked with trading options and going deep on that instead, using Troy Broussard’s brilliant methodology in our Low Stress Trading bid’niz.
Sometimes you just gotta go with the flow…
For now I will just say:
I have an idea of how I think things will go, and possibly even end.
But I am also far more interested in the characters than the plot at first. As long as I can put the plot into a TV guide-sized summary I’m good. After that I just think about the characters. Sometimes for months or even years or, in some cases, even decades.
But I don’t force things and let them unfold as the story progresses.
The best and most fun part of the process is when everything takes on a life and path of its own and you become just as much a member of the audience as the other readers. My favorite parts of writing the 9th novel in my Enoch Wars series (Serpent Seed) was when suddenly the characters were writing themselves.
I never really understood what that meant until then.
It’s quite surreal when it happens.
And it was one of the most exciting parts of writing I’ve ever experienced.
The key is not to stress about it, or get worried about it, or overthink it. If anything, the less I try to force things, the less I know about the ending, the less I try to create “good writing” the better things turn out and the more great memories I have of the process.
Stephen King says a lot of dumb shyt.
Especially when he starts tweeting.
But one thing I learned from him — a “what not to do” lesson — that has been invaluable is about when he wrote Insomnia. He said he did not think it was all that great because he plotted it out unlike most of his works. And I agree, it just meanders. Like 300 pages of nothing happening that could have been cut out. It reads as if it is anything but tightly plotted even though it was plotted.
Something to think about…
I also don’t buy into the whole “know your ending” shtick.
I’m not saying it is always bad or it’s wrong or not to know it either way.
All I am saying is it can go great whether you know it at first or not. Take book 3 in my Enoch Wars series (Demon Crossfire). I had no clue how it was going to go, I just knew how it’d start. Much of the plot came to me as I was writing and I just let it happen. It looks like it is probably the tightest plotted book of the entire series that looks like I had it all figured out from the start.
But really I did not know jack outside I knew it’d have demons in it.
In fact, with the ending, I was sitting at a stoplight the day before writing that chapter. And I was starting to almost stress about how to end the thing. Then suddenly the idea hit me, along with the car that probably was waiting for me to go when it turned green, as I let the idea I had sink in…That ending then turned into a major plot point for the 5th book, which while I had a general idea what it’d be about, turned into something else altogether and effected all the books after that until the very last chapter of the last book.
Writing is controlled randomness in my opinion.
That said, everyone has their way of doing things, of solving problems, of enjoying the process.
I don’t think there is a right or wrong way.
There is just your way.
I like to think Bukowski’s popularity proves that..
If you’ve read this far this might disappoint you. But probably the only advice I am qualified to give about writing fiction is to turn on your computer, open your word processing app of choice, and type one word at a time until you get to the part where you write “the end.”
$497 course on writing fiction forthcoming…
Just kidding.
Instead, to learn more about the paid Email Players newsletter go here:
Ben Settle
