Pebblepup's Writing Den

When you go on vacation, you often plan the trip before hand. It’s part of the anticipation. Planning is important for anything. In writing, having a plan for the piece can be the difference between a nice story and a great one.

Everyone knows about the plot, but there is more to planning than the plot. There are people who sit down and write their story. They don’t plot their story beforehand. They write without a plan. That’s the myth. They have a plan. It’s not written down, but there is a plan.

Plotting aside there are other areas where a plan helps in writing. You need to plan when you are going to write something. You need to do some work on creating characters and the setting places. This is the planning I’m talking about.

When I have an idea for a story, I have a document of notes. I put that in a folder with the working title. I do character sketches based on character charts as well. That goes in that folder as well. I make crude maps of the area, choose floor plans for the buildings I will describe in the story. They all go into the folder.

I make what I call a project control document. I use the document to plan how I will go about creating my story. The project control document is self-descriptive. It has a section for the log line, which I will copy there. The next section is a list of characters. I base my character sketches on that list. I follow that by the settings, which is a list of the places I will need to describe in the story. Then I plot the story. I’m a plantser. I do a broad plot, then I describe the action that should happen in each scene. That list of scene descriptions goes next.

I follow that with a chart. That’s where I list things like writing, revision, formatting, publishing. I include a space for the date I complete each task. That’s the control part of the planning. I also include deadlines for the times I want to have everything completed by.

That’s my process for planning stories. It’s useful to me. It may be useful to you, but if you are a pantser, you may want a broad list of deadlines. I talked about deadlines before, so I won’t go into that here.

Planning helps you get everything ready for the actual righting. It can be as detailed or broad as you wish. Planning can help you see where you want your writing to go. Even if you only choose to do a very broad plan, you have a framework to work with. That’s key to a good story. An author needs to have some idea of where they are going.

It’s good to have an idea of what your story is about, even if all you have to start with is the log line. Your plan could involve setting aside time to write the story. It could be a detailed plot. It could be a few sentences. The journey goes smoother if you know where you are going.