I have fallen into a trap. I have lost the spark in writing by getting lost in the formulaic approach towards writing and now I feel like anything I write is just paint-by-numbers. I was curious about others and how they approach plotting out scenes and chapters, if you do so at all. What has worked well for you, or what didn't? Do you have particular methods or just write until a particular, satisfactory point? I'm interested in hearing what kind of technique you use.
Probably my preferred method is just to figure out the general character arc for the MC and a character web, get a good idea for some of the major turning points, and basically how I want it to end (with the understanding that as I write anything can and probably will change), and then I just start writing and see if I can stick to the course or not. But it's vitally important that I have a good fix on at least a few of the characters, since a story at heart is character interaction. If I can get that it's sometimes enough. The characters need to come alive, to sparkle and scintillate, or I've got nothing to work with.
I tend to have a big picture plot overview, big picture character development, a few key turning-point scenes, and at least the opening few scenes mapped out before I start. Then I outline a few scenes ahead of wherever I am, because I write much faster when I have a scene outlined. By the time I’m a few chapters in, I’ll probably finally pin down the rest of the scenes. One big caveat: I change my outline all the time. If I discover some fun new element or something that isn’t working, I’ll implement those changes and alter my outline to match. The book I end up with never looks like my initial outline.
I should add that I often have to spend a good deal of time developing my ideas, but that isn't done by making an outline. I just write long-form in paragraphs. But this isn't for plot development, it's to develop characters and their relationships, and maybe the situation they find themselves in. I'm a discovery writer, so I think by writing. As I often say, I write about the story (sometimes for a long time) before I write the story. I guess sometimes I do work out difficult parts of the plot this way come to think of it. Anything and everything that needs working out.
How do you outline your scenes? What kind of information do you find important or validates a scene being worth writing?
That's the problem—if you do too much of the creative work in outline form then there's none left for the actual writing and it becomes a dull chore. And that will translate right through for the readers too. They can feel the joy you felt in the actual writing (not so much in the outlining). I would say you want to do as little as possible in outlining, and leave a lot of gaps (pretty big ones) where you can work things out in the actual writing. It's like living your daily life—do you want to have everything already precisely scheduled out, every minute of every day? Or maybe just the most important things, and leave the rest to live spontaneously? Important is the wrong word, I think many of the most important things are the ones you want to be able to write spontaneously, so there's life in them. There's no formula to make your work less formulaic. You just have to let go and do more of it by the seat of the pants.
I spent so long worrying if my work was valid, if I was hitting all the marks of universal storytelling that I lost the spark of writing. It's turned my passion into frustration, and my confidence has been absolutely pummelled into the ground. I feel like I'm either lost--frustrated in just pantsing like I'm making it up as I go along, or I'm just overthinking and worried that my outline is pointless filler. I don't know what makes my writing worth reading, what makes my chapters worth the story or if everything I'm writing is better off in the trash. Mostly it's just trying to push past this need for formulaic crutches. I wish I could just get out of this rutt and have no idea where to start.
How long have you been writing? I think every writer needs to go through a good long period of just writing for fun, not worrying at all if it's good according to professional standards or other external factors. I was lucky enough to get this phase out of the way starting when I was a kid. There was no internet, so I didn't have access to sites like this, and there weren't a lot of 'how to write fiction' kind of books. At least not that I was aware of. But I wasn't into it that way anyway, I was just having fun and developing my native skills as I went. I kept getting better year by year, until (after a few deacdes) I decided it was time to try to spruce it up closer to pro standards. But I really do believe it's necessary first to get in those 10,000 hours of practice. Hopefully with decent grammar and spelling and punctuation etc. You seem to be good enough at that basic stuff. I believe a lot of people who start writing as adults in the internet age are severely hampered by immediately discovering all the pro-level advice that they're not ready for yet, and that's another thing that steals away all the fun and joy writing should be about for the first few years (if not a decade).
I rarely outline. But when i do, i bulletpoint and use it as a guide. But i hardly ever stick to it. If anything, its helpful in organizing my jumbled thoughts so i have a bank to pull from. But usually, i just write and let the story develop how its supposwd to develop. Sometimes i will do chapter outlines. Like, if I dont have time to sit down and write, i'll make a note on a chapter like "this chapter, ____ gets stabbed" How does ____ get stabbed? Dont know. Who stabs ___? Dont know. When does it happen? Dont know. I just know that i WANT it to happen. So when i open up my document later, i'll know the end goal.... ____ must get stabbed. (The fun part for me is coming up with the different scenarios that may or may not change in the next draft)
I have been writing for a long while. I've spent a long time like this, zipping between confident and completely lost. I enjoyed writing but pushed through pantsing, trying to make detailed outlines, then barely legible outlines. I take the craft seriously, but feel like I have no direction anymore, or that my writing feels hollow. I don't know where to go from here. I'm worried to write and end up wasting hours upon hours rewriting pointless fluff. I'd love to have a byline and work through my writing with some kind of plan. I just feel flustered, I guess. I hate what I write and feel like nothing is worth the effort of writing. It doesn't look good in the long run of trying to take this craft seriously.
How long is long? Months, years? A decade or more? Is this just a writing thing, or does it affect other areas of your life? Have you gone through a nice long period of writing for fun, and now want to move beyond that, or did you basically try to bypass the fun part? It's hard to tell from what you wrote. How long have you been outlining? Have you read a few different approaches to it, and tried several? I find it's important to not just follow one approach, but learn several, try to abstract out the principles, and make whatever adjustments you need to make for each project, so you're never strictly following any system or method. It's necessary to learn the methods to the point that you understand the underlying principles, and then you can play around with the parameters. Not only that, but once you understand the reasons for outlining—plot points, rising action etc, and once it's become ingrained enough through practice and repetition—you can then let it all go and just write intuitively. You have that knowledge stored away in the deep parts of your mind now, just like for instance riding a bike or walking or talking. You should be able to do it now without needing the training wheels. This is why I studied plotting and story structure for a few years and just recently decided to stop (at least for now) and try working intuitively again. I definitely work best intuitively, and like you, I reached a point where I was over-plotting and took all the fun out. But now I can write straight ahead, assuming I've developed my characters and ideas enough and have a good idea for a story, and I can feel if I'm heading for messing it up (sometimes). Or sometimes I just mess it up and have to re-do a chapter or two. More likely just a few parts thereof. Revision is an essential part of writing. If you see it as a terrible chore and a sign that you screwed up real bad and then punish yourself for it, that's entirely the wrong attitude. It's a constant back and forth between writing and then making some changes.
its never pointless... it just may not work for that particular story. I have a "scrap" document where i paste scenes or chapters that i cut from various projects because they just dont work in that story. sometimes i recycle those scenes or ideas in another piece where it works better. sometimes, if i need a writing prompt, i go back to the scraps and turn one of those scenes into a short story. ane even if i dont use it, it serves a purpose.... like "now i know what i dont want for that scene" or "i like the IDEA of that rewrite, but it still missed the mark... but at least i know where to go next" the point is... your "pointless fluff" is more helpful than you think.
It's been ten years where I started out just enjoying the process. I'd write aimlessly, poorly, and with no direction. I'd end up writing awful stuff, but over time I developed my approach. I went from nothing but aimlessness, to plotting out detailed outlines, but I realized I spent too much time outlining and it killed the buzz of writing because I'd write novel-lengths of summaries and synopsis's. I found a kind of middle ground of plotting, but tried to devour every how-to manual I could to learn structure. I studied three-act structure, plot points, rising action, resolution; general story and character analysis. I can write characters, I feel comfortable with them in my mind and on the page, but it just became this ingrained belief of "You must do things this way." I just wrote myself into a corner, worrying so much more about the formulas. And yes, I studied a lot of them. I tried pantsing. Goal, conflict, disaster. Sequels. Using McKee's idea of values to turn scenes. Plotting out rough. Plotting out intricately. And, But, Therefore. And then I just got to a point where my mind consciously worried about so much formula, and adhering to formula that now when I write, I just feel like my work suffers--it's like it's dead on the page because I'm so focused on formula. I had that enjoyable part where I was carefree about it, but now, chasing it further and professionally, has got me deflated with it all. I don't know what to do, really. I dread trying to write. I can appreciate the idea that nothing is wasted, but I end up rewriting constantly, never being even the least bit satisfied with what I've written and most of the stuff ends up on the cutting room floor, or deleted forever because I can't even find any relevance or point to what I've written. It's not fun anymore.
OK, it sounds like when you were pantsing (a term I really dislike) you hadn't gotten very good yet. And then you began obsessing over structure and plotting. And honestly it sounds like the problem is the obsessing. My advice is to just write. Have fun with it. Don't plot or outline, Don't worry about structure. Often writers don't even think about plot or structure until a second or third draft, and that's how I recommend you try it. When I was looking into step outlines (aka beat sheets) the advice I ran across (that I strongly agree with) is that they're not a way to write a story—that's best done in full sentence form line by line. In other words more like pantsing. Arranging it into structure is for after the creative work has been done. If you begin with form and structure, that's too formal and too scientific. Art isn't made that way—it flows out from the heart with passion. You can organize it later.
I suspect the OP's experience is almost universal amongst writers who try to use other people's formal theories. Story-telling is a feat of language. We put it on paper, but the brain structures that do it evolved for verbal/out-loud communication. And they're unique to each person. That's obvious in speech - that we all talk a certain way - but it's magnified at the level of story-structure. We each need our own theory-base and conceptual language. I'd suggest to go back to freewriting and make it gradually longer. As that runs into difficulties, and starts to require intermediate levels of structure above the paragraph, give those structures names and use them to hold up longer and longer stories. What has worked well for me (well being very much relative) has been to start from inspiration, then form the characters, and then resist trying to fit them into a story I think I want to tell... so that instead I tell the story of what those characters naturally did and said, through being themselves. This is some sort of pantsing, but (imo) to link a character's granular thoughts and emotions together authentically is as challenging as to link them to an abstract story arc. Inspiration is a floating term. I mean that if I have a mental image or daydream I'm trying to relate to the reader, I might describe it: "A woman stands on a path on the side of a great concrete bridge, looking into the vanishing point in the parallel lines in the structure" but for that to have any significance to a reader, first they have to know who she is. I think inspiration always has a person in it.
I can't just pants though. I need to have some kind of outline, even bare minimum of what happens to a point. I suck at this.
From what you describe, the problem might be that your mind "outlines" things in a radically different way from the theories you've applied so far. If so, the logic-of-composition might have to be discovered gradually. Therefore I'm suggesting to pants until it breaks... then introduce a higher structural concept so it doesn't break... then continue with that until that breaks. "outline" is like "arc" or "plot beat" - these terms can become pretty meaningless outside our own heads, and it's up to us to define them for ourselves, including through experimentation
I see what you mean. Go back to complete basics and kind of find my own comfortable process outside of all these formulas flowing around my brain.
Or just outline very minimally. Only the major story beats, and work out the rest in the writing. As you're writing you know about where you need a turning point or an inciting incident or whatever, no need to work that all out in advance in a massive outline. Just wing it.
How would I outline minimally? Just a few notes on important points throughout the timeline? I mean, there's only one big plot point, and an inciting incident. I wouldn't plan much further than the first act.
Pretty much what I said in my first response above. You want to know the basic gist of the story, work out the major turning points, how you want it to end, and have a good cast of characters figured out and a character arc for the MC. Also a good character web helps immensely—each character has their own stance in relation to the major themes of the story—some are helpers to the MC some are working against him or maybe help him out for parts of the story but against him for others, depending on their stance. But don't fill in a lot of detail. Let that happen as you write. This way you've got a good solid idea of what needs to happen in each section. As part of each day's writing you'll think through at least the next few paragraphs or maybe pages, get a loose idea of what needs to happen, and then start writing. Can you explain what this means—
Sorry, I meant that I tend to only outline the first act with a large structure because I know the story will change and mold around things. So in my first act I know there's an inciting incident, and then the plot point that kind of leads into act 2. I tend to outline scene by scene but obviously I've been swallowed by formulaic thinking, so I need to focus on a bigger picture, like you said.
Ah ok, I get it. Well, instead of plotting that scene, just write it. Have your loose framework plotted out, and think through the day's scene, just like you would if you were plotting it, but instead of plotting it just write it. Then do the same for the second scene, and etc.
I just started a new project. After doing some of the research (more will be done as I needed), I decided to try outlining using Excel. I'm outlining by chapter/scene. I have found I can outline a scene, then write the scene. Then I go to the next one. It's all being done in chunks. I don't feel so bogged down this way.
