I was just brainstorming on my plot. I was struggling with it... like how do you link everything together and make it compelling with out going insane. When it hit me that the start of my plot should begin with what ever crazy plan my villain has. I was wondering if anyone does the same thing and if not what do you do? I thought this would be something fun to explore.
I always describe my approach as brute force: no matter how long I've had an idea in mind, I'm always tinkering with how changing one small aspect or another would impact everything else, and I'm always analyzing what I like more about each version just in case I'm able to come up with yet another version later which has the best of both.
mine is the scatterbrain approach. i'm not treating my story like a story right now. there is nothing linear about what i'm doing. i know who i want my characters to be and a general idea of what they're trying to accomplish, so i'm just writing scenes as they pop in to my head. i have action sequences, revelations, conversations and character meetings, and there is zero continuity to any of it. if you told me to make it in to a story i would fail miserably. BUT. now there are dots of paint in the water, and they're starting to spread. a random scene where two of my characters bicker like schoolgirls made me realize that in another scene they need to clash, which creates a conflict i hadn't planned on writing. in true ADD fashion i bounce from idea to idea, never staying in one place for too long. my brain won't stand for it, and it actually works pretty well. it lets my ideas breathe a little. most importantly, i'm not treating this like a book. it's a life. a book is really just a small sampling of a great bit world, right? so if you think about it, treating your work as a book is a bad way to go about it. you can always tell which authors wrote a book instead of a world, because plot points seem contrived and characters seem cardboard. write about a world, and then use a magnifying glass to cherry pick the best pieces to showcase. i think when you allow that to happen, the book will emerge from the details on its own.
@Dax8472 . @Megs33 has a very good point, just tell your story and let it take you, the writer, along with it for the ride. This was my approach with "The Eagle and the Dragon" ... initial plot, such as it was, was "Romans go to China by sea, bad guys trying to take their ships. Get to China, trouble in court involving woman and Roman sense of honor, big trouble for Romans, some kind of escape, back to Rome on foot, bad guys trying to kill them." Now 550 pages, that is still the plot, but my God, what twists, turns and character interplay! Writing it was like watching a TV series... I had to write the next chapter to find out what happened! And as a result, it reads like a TV series. And it is doing quite well for a self-published book
Also, Martha Mitchell, when writing "Gone with the Wind," wrote the last chapter first, then the others in no particular order. It worked for her. There is a continuing debate, more intense than between democrats and republicans, the debate between planners and pantsers about how best to write a book. I fall into the pantser category, though mine also involved a heck of a lot of research and planning to see where they were going, how long it would take, what would they know (no radio, telephone, radar, extremely limited, slow and unreliable written communication). My friend David Poyer (best-selling modern Naval fiction, fellow Academy alumnus and on the board of the Naval Academy lit dept, his books required reading), he on the other hand builds character profiles, in depth, plus a flow chart of where characters are and when they get to where they interact, story and chapter synopses, etc. before he writes a word of the story. He is a planner, and purports to have no clue how I just channel my characters to let them tell the story. I am a tech writer/engineer, and if I outlined my fiction his way, it would sound like my tech manuals. And if he tried my approach, he would probably wind up with a tangled mess. Each of us writes differently.
I recommend the Shiraz, for the writing phase, Woodford Reserve for editing, and Baltika 9 for the marketing phase.
That's kinda what I'm doing... I started with a vague idea, and the story has been fleshing itself out over time as I find new things and come up with new ideas. Sometimes I feel like I'm building a puzzle but I don't have the box - I try fitting things in; sometimes they work, and other times I have to discard them or turn them around a bit until they do. It's an interesting process.