Planning for Pantsers - The Thing about Themes

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

“Argh! I don’t have a theme! I NEED a THEME!”

And so a billion stories have remained unwritten for want of a theme.

What is this elusive concept anyway and is it really that important for a story to have one? Simply put, a theme is an underlying idea or common thread that flows from the beginning of the story to the end. It can be something as infinitely broad as Good versus Evil, or something more focused such as Betrayal.

Most brilliantly written novels will have several interweaving themes threaded through the story. Some are so subtle that you can reread the book several times before you finally spot them, feeling as brilliant as Sherlock when you finally do.

A lot of “How to Write” workshops/courses/clinics, suggest the necessity for deciding your theme before you write. While this may work for some, it doesn’t work all that well for me as a Pantser. I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I hear “What’s your theme?” and instantly I hit a blank. How do you sum up your pride and joy, the sweat and blood you’ve poured into the blank pages for months; in a simple phrase or a single word? What happens if you have more than one theme?

In my humble opinion; themes are important, there’s no doubt about that. Someone once said, “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything,” and that’s what a theme does. It gives your book something to stand for.

However, I don’t think that you need to decide on your theme before you even start writing. If, for example, you decide right at the beginning that your book is going to be about Good versus Evil, well, good for you. But what is good and what is evil in your book? Who are the good guys, and why do they have to fight the bad guys? And why should we care?

Before you even decide on a theme, you should be answering the important questions: Why is Bob good? What makes him so great? Do we like him for being good, or do we want to punch his perfectly handsome face in because he’s just TOO perfect?

And if we want to punch him for being so sickeningly sweet, is there a situation we can put him in to make us empathise with him?

Therein lies the key ingredient to writing a book with meaningful themes. Creating characters and situations that readers can empathise and sympathise with, giving them challenges that seem impossible to overcome and yet the reader is with them every step of the way, cheering them on because even though we want to break their nose with our fist, we still want to see them succeed because they deserve to.

Themes are what book-reviewers, editors and publishers look for in your writing. As a writer, your only concern should be with telling a story that means something to you. Because if it means something to you, then guaranteed it will resonate with someone else.

Leave the theme for later, when your betas have read your novel and said “You know, I really love the theme of Unconditional Love that runs through your story, even though it was really difficult for the characters to get to that point.”

Then you can turn around in an elevator when you have a poor publisher helplessly trapped between floors and say, “My book’s theme is Unconditional Love. I’d LOVE for you to read it.”

How do you feel about themes? Do they make or break your book?

Planning for Pantsers - Explaining Essentials

Calvin and Hobbes - Bill Watterson

Last week we worked on timelines, and sorting your scenes into some semblance of order. When we discussed making scenes, we spoke about ensuring that something, anything, happened in every scene in order to keep the story interesting.

This week we’re going to be discussing two essential elements of stories, things your story HAS to have in order to tell one.

When I first heard about the character and story arcs, I struggled to make sense of it. Definitions were vague and indefinite and although I searched for examples to make it clearer, I didn’t find very many that were useful. It took a while before I was able to make it sound sensible in a way I understood. So, presented here are my - admittedly - a bit simplified, but hopefully clear, definitions and examples.

An arc describes a movement, from one point to another. When applied to writing, this refers to story and character arcs.

A Story Arc is the movement of the story from the beginning, to the end. It is what keeps the story moving forward, provides the focus of a climax, and then ends it after the challenges have been resolved. It can be the change from one setting to another, or the change that makes characters view their setting in a different way, but in order for an arc to exist, change has to happen.

The same is true in a Character Arc except that these can be internal - the change occurs because the character makes a decision to change, or external - something happens to force the change.

The two types of arc are dependent on each other - if there is no story arc, the characters won’t grow, or move from where they are at the beginning. If there’s no character arc, the story won’t move from point A to point B.

Both elements can have several different arcs - in a novel, the settings can change numerous times and various characters can undergo several shifts in their ways of thinking or acting.

The confusing thing about arcs, and something that I’ve only recently come to realise, is that you don’t need to outline them at all. You don’t even need to really think about them all that much.

Which sounds contrary to the idea of them being essential to telling a story. Stick with me here, while I attempt to explain my reason for saying this.

If you’ve followed this series since Week 1, you will have already dealt with creating scenes and then ordering them into your timeline. If you followed the rule of making sure that SOMETHING happens in each scene to keep your reader hooked, then change (the overall element of an arc), is already present in your novel.

In creating a timeline, you’ve ordered the elements of change, the movement, and created an arc. The characters and story undergo shifts within each scene, and each one brings them closer to the solution of the trials that you’ve put them through.

As with scenes and timelines, the only rule to making sure that the arc makes sense, is to remain consistent within the story telling itself. If you manage to do that, your arcs will fall into place automatically - which is great if you’re a Pantser who hates planning.

How do you feel about Story Arcs? Does the idea of finding one before you start writing leave you feeling intimidated? I'd love to hear from you. 

Planning for Pantsers - Just in Time

 If you don’t have them, you might end up with a story that looks like this paragraph. In most stories, they reach the end, start with a beginning, and go through the middle. Timelines are important. They set out to tell the story in an order that makes sense.

Let’s try that again, shall we?

Timelines are important. They set out to tell the story in an order that makes sense. In most stories, they start with a beginning and go through the middle to reach the end.

But they don’t have to follow the three-act structure in order to tell the story in a specific order. The confusion with timelines comes in when a writer forgets the story he’s trying to tell, and starts to jump around, mixing up scenes and events within the story. The scenes on their own will still make sense, but much like the first paragraph of this post, when you put them all together, they’re jumbled and give the plot away long before you’ve hooked the reader.

As a writer, you have the power to change time itself. You also have the power to confuse the time stream to such an extent that you create multiple time warps and end up on a stage with aliens in drag doing a funky chicken dance. If you’re a pantser, you’ve probably time warped a few times while writing.

Last week I spoke about making scenes, and creating the titles for them so that you roughly know what’s going to happen throughout the story.

I found that when I did this exercise, I created the scenes from where I imagined the story would start, adding odd bits here and there before reaching what I thought would be the end.

The problem I discovered while doing this is that I’m never sure which scene I’m going to be writing next. Part of being a pantser means that you just write, sometimes with a vague idea of where you want the scene to go, but mostly, you’re just writing until something hits a chord and you get a small part of the story that sits right.

Of course, this means that by the end of having written 50 odd scenes, you’re left with a whole lot of time warps. Which is where timelines come into play.

First of all, we need to define what a timeline in novel writing is NOT.

• A timeline is not an A to Z layout of events in your story.
• A timeline is not always structured from the beginning to the end.
• A timeline is not necessarily in date order.
• A timeline is not set in stone.

That said, it’s time to delve into what novel timelines ARE.

• A timeline is a layout of events that happen in your story.
• A timeline can be structured to include flashbacks, journal entries, dreams, or if you’re writing a time-travelling novel, future and past events.
• A timeline is set up to help you keep track of all your important scenes, so that you can be sure to write bridging scenes between Big Event A, and Big Event B.
• A timeline is a device to make sure that Betty isn’t pregnant with Bob’s baby two months before they meet.
• A timeline can be changed to help the story flow better, so don’t be scared to mix it around a bit.

If you’re working with Scrivener, you have the lovely option of viewing your scenes on a virtual corkboard. This makes creating a “timeline” extremely simple, because you just click and drag the index cards into the order in which you’d like to tell the story.

Liquid Story Binder is free to use for 30 days, after which you need to purchase the software. It comes with a timeline feature, in which you can sort your timelines by date, character, events, etc.

The Timeline app from ReadWriteThink is free, and allows you to create a straightforward A-Z timeline of events, which is useful if you just want to know when things happened if not where they’ll appear in your story.

Timelines are a Pantser’s best friend, for the simple reason that if you’re writing your scenes as they pop into your head, you can write them all, and then place them into a semi-coherent order - your novel’s timeline.

Once that is done, you get to play with writing bridging scenes, and editing, making sure that your story flows smoothly from one scene to the next, whether you’re jumping ahead to the future, or tripping back to the past. Just make sure that unless you meant to do it, you don’t create time warps and funky chickens.

Ninja Chicken from play.google.com

Planning for Pantsers - Make a Scene

Scenes are the cornerstones of novels. Contrary to the popular idea that the number of chapters is how readers measure the book, what keeps people reading are the scenes, and how you transition from one scene to the other.

Some people have the ability to write scenes that continue for pages and yet keep the reader on the edge of their seats, waiting eagerly for what comes next. Others prefer short, sharp, edgy scenes that keep readers turning the page to get to the next scene for resolution.

As you keep writing, you’ll find what works for you with regards to voice, characterisation, timing and a standard length of scenes. Until I started Rose House, my average scene length was about 500 words. I simply couldn’t figure out how to get them any longer, no matter how hard I tried.

With Rose House, I woke up one morning and realised that the length of the scene wasn’t important. It was the content. If I wanted to make that 50k word count, I needed to have content that would inspire me to keep writing those scenes, no matter how long they took.

Unfortunately, as a pantser, coming up with ideas for scenes is a lot harder than it sounds. My usual method is to sit down, stare blankly at my screen for half an hour, write one paragraph and call it a scene.

The problem with that method is that nothing much can happen in a few sentences, and every scene needs to carry the plot forward in some way. If nothing happens in your scene, it isn’t necessary to tell the story and will be tedious to write, never mind reading it!

The other problem is, no one enjoys reading lengthy scenes filled with descriptions that are only used to fill space. Unless you’re really, really good at painting pictures with words, you’re going to lose your reader with endless exposition.

So how do you combat all that when you’re planning your novel bearing in mind that you don’t usually plan anything, you just write?

First, let’s look at what a scene is. A scene is the smallest component of a story, something that happens within it to move it forward. There can be any number of scenes in a chapter, but no chapters in a scene.

When writing your novel, your basic plot looks something like this:

Beginning: Bob meets Betty.

Middle: Betty and Bob have a fight.

End: Betty and Bob make up and everything ends happily ever after.

Scenes come into play when you want to describe the following:

How did Bob meet Betty?

What happened to cause the fight?

When did the fight happen?

How did they resolve it and live happily ever after?

There is one essential rule with writing scenes - Something pivotal to the story has to happen. The problem most pantsers, myself included, seem to experience with scenes is that we write scenes like this:

Betty and Bob go on a picnic and spend hours talking about nothing in particular, staring romantically into each other’s eyes and wishing the picnic will never end.

If that’s your typical scene, then the picnic will never end for the reader, because she would have fallen asleep after the first few sentences. As a writer, you don’t want to do that to her.

The question is, how do you come up with scenes in the first place, and then make them interesting enough to keep your readers reading?

This is where Scrivener (or yWriter) comes in handy although you can just as easily do this on index cards, cut up pages of paper, in a handy notebook, or on a pile of serviettes if you’re going for the artistic writer effect. Just make sure that if you use any of the latter methods, you have somewhere safe to keep your scenes in order, otherwise you’ll lose the plot. *insert bad pun gigglesnort*

*Ahem* Sorry about that. Onward!

First off, decide how many words you want your novel to be. If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, this is easy. The target is decided for you at 50000 words. If you’re aiming for more (as an epic fantasy for example), then you’ll adjust the length or number of your scenes accordingly.

Because I used this method for NaNoWriMo, I decided that the average length of my scenes would be between 1000 and 2000 words, and I would need about 50 scenes of at least 1000 words each to get from the beginning of the story to the end.

This number seemed really intimidating to me, so I broke it down even further. Rose House is written in Multiple Points of View, from the perspectives of about five different characters. I decided that the two main characters, Jeremy and Sarah, would each have 10 scenes dedicated to their POVs and that Amy and Luke would get 10 scenes between them. The remaining 20 scenes would be split between journal entries, and the Elementals.

Depending on the format of your novel, this method may or may not work for you, but if you find yourself intimidated by the bigger numbers, take some time to break it up into chunks that feel more manageable. If, for example, you have a single POV narration, use the time line of your story to split the scenes. So that 10 scenes are dedicated to a single time period in your novel, 10 are for the next time period, and so on. How you split the scenes is up to you, but the idea is to keep some sort of manageable order without micro-managing. We are pantsers after all!

Using Scrivener you can create empty text pages in the binder. If you’re working on paper, make sure you have the allotted number of index cards, torn pages or whatever works for you. Depending on how you split your scenes, give each page a heading. In Scrivener, I had 10 pages labelled Jeremy, 10 - Sarah, 10 Amy and Luke, and 20 were left blank.

Once that’s done, start creating titles for your scenes. I generally use a simple sentence that describes what’s going to happen to the POV character in the scene. Do as many as you can, and then leave the rest of the scene cards blank. It’s not important to have them all filled at this point in time. As you start to write the actual scenes, other ideas will come to you and you’ll be able to fill the rest of the cards faster than you think. If you’re unsure what makes a good scene, remember that the Main Character of the scene has to want something - either to get it, or to avoid it - and the scene needs to answer the who, how, what, where and how of his desire. In one of my scenes for Rose House, Jeremy is desperate to get to his siblings’ class after school because Luke is often the victim of bullies. What happens when Jeremy is late leads to the idea for the title of my scene: “Amy and Luke deal with bullies.”

After writing most of your titles set yourself a daily writing goal. This is where the WriteChain Challenge comes in handy. Mine was generally to complete one or two scenes a day, since that would get me to the finish line, but it’s important to set yourself goals that don’t overwhelm you or leave you feeling like a failure if you don’t meet them. If you don’t meet your daily goal, don’t beat yourself up about it. Just try to make it for the next one. Guilt trips take all the fun out of the act of writing and are actually counter-productive.

It doesn’t matter if the scenes are coherent or fit neatly into your story’s time line. That will be fixed later. What’s important now is that you’re getting the ideas in your head down in writing in a semi-coherent fashion.

Scrivener allows you to mark your scenes in the binder in a colour. It also allows you to shuffle them around on the cork-board overview. As I finished writing each scene, I would mark it in blue, write the titles for any additional scenes that came to me as a result of that one, and then check the cork-board to see that the layout of the scenes matched the time line of the story.

I found that as the screen filled with highlighted blue titles, it was that much easier to keep going, writing more scenes then I’d thought possible. With each completed scene, I was also able to fill in the details of my plot, fleshing out what had just been a vague idea when I first started.

Then I had to figure out the time line of my story. Which is a topic for the next post; Just in Time.

I welcome your feedback, and look forward to hearing if this post helped you at all or if there are any points that are unclear. Drop me a comment and tell me how you plan your scenes. I can’t wait to hear all about it! 

Check back next Sunday for the second post: Just in Time when we'll look at creating Timelines. 

Planning for Pantsers - Essential Tools

Welcome to Week 1 of Planning for Pantsers. If you’re not sure what this is, have a look at the Intro here.

Throughout my writing process, I use various helpful tools and websites without which I’d be even more lost than I usually am. This post will deal with a few of the ‘tools’ I consider essential to making sense of planning.

Right before NaNoWriMo, I purchased Scrivener*. I am now a Scrivener convert, preaching it as the religion of choice for all writers! For those of you who are familiar with it, great! For those of you who aren’t, I highly recommend downloading the free trial and then begging, pleading or borrowing for the money to purchase the full version. It’s not too expensive and is well worth every cent. If you don’t have Scrivener it is still possible to work the way I describe in the series, but will require more organisation than most pantsers have (or at least; it’s more than I have).

I also suggest investing in Holly Lisle’s clinics available on her website, although if you’re wary of doing so, she has a lot of free workshops available as well which are just as helpful for basic plotting. I first bought her “Create-A-…” clinics in about 2009. To this day, I refer back to them when I get lost. They're full of commonsense, humour and helpful tips and tricks. She’ll be releasing her Create-A-World Clinic soon and I’m waiting anxiously for the day when I can purchase it and make my world complete.

Inspiration. For me this comes in the form of the Twitter community of writers; amazing music; blogs and websites written by writers for writers; quirky quotes; crazy animal pictures; my friends and family. Wherever you get it from, inspiration isn’t the invisible idea that strikes when you least expect it. It’s a tool like any other, that you pull out and use to motivate and inspire you to sit down and write even when you really want to sleep, watch TV or go to the toilet. Okay, so maybe you should go to the toilet when you want to, but for the others, tying yourself to the chair works. A cat sitting on your feet with his claws ready to pierce the sensitive skin on your toes should you move also helps.

These are the essential items in my kit. I’m sure that as I continue to grow in my writing, I will discover more, but for now these work just fine in conjunction with each other.

Please excuse me while I go dig Zeus’ claws out of my foot. 

*yWriter is a free programme that offers features similar to Scrivener. Although I have it, I haven't played around with it yet so I can't say how useful it is for the techniques I use in this series. You can download it for free here. 

Check back on Sunday for the 1st Lesson - Make a Scene

Planning for Pantsers - Intro

Welcome to the Intro of my Planning for Pantsers blog series!

Cartoon from Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

I’ve decided to jump onto the bandwagon of creating serials for blogs, mostly because I love the ones people like Skye, Taylor and Cristina over at Think Ink and The Sprint Shack have created. They’re inspiring, and we all know how much I love inspiration.

First off, a definition:

Pantser: Someone who writes without planning, from the “seat of their pants.” Every word written is normally a surprise, with no real idea of how to get from A to B, if you even know what B is. Or A for that matter.

I can hear you laughing all the way over here now. Shush. Allow me to explain why I think planning for pantsers is a good idea. You comfortable? Good.

Simply put, I’m a pantser. I generally start stories with no clue where they’re going, how to get there or even what I’m trying to convey. It works, for a while. Then my stories usually fizzle out.

In November, I took part in NaNoWriMo. I started without a complete idea and in about two weeks of real time, I managed to finish. Part of it was sheer luck and desperation. The other part was taking some time to plan just enough so that I would reach the 50,000 word goal.

In doing so, the inspiration (oh look, there’s that word again), to create this series struck.

So what exactly is this series going to do? Well, hopefully one of two things:

1. Inspire you to plan just a little so that you can finish that amazing story you have to tell, or

2. Teach you something about writing that maybe you didn’t know, and introduce you to a few techniques that will keep you from the dreaded writer’s block.

How is it going to do that? 

We’ll be exploring different elements of writing a story over a 6 week period, each week featuring a new aspect, how I applied it to my own novel and how you can apply it to yours. I’ll also feature some helpful links to writing websites or blogs, along with some guest posts from other pantsers  and how they get around to planning, and finishing, their novels.

I do hope you’ll join me? 

Look out for the first week's post: Make a Scene on the 29th of December.