You Shouldn’t Write Your Book Like That!

(Unless it is working for you)

There is no one right way to write a book.

For every author who writes a 20k-word plan for their novel, there’s another who sits down and just wings it. I know authors who delete their entire first draft and start again (I have to be honest: this one makes me feel a bit sick). I know authors who know exactly what the twist is, but don’t know how they’re going to get there. I know authors who take ten years to write a novel, and authors who can bash one out in six weeks.

Which is all to say: you should do whatever works for you.

Very often in coaching calls authors will say to me, ‘I’m a pantser¹, does that matter?’ – I have to be honest, it’s far more often the pantsers who are worried they should be plotting than the plotters who worry they should be flying by the seat of their pants – or ‘I do X and Y but I read about Famous Author who does Z, should I do that?’ And my answer is always that it only matters if it’s not working for you.

Authors I have previously published would probably raise an eyebrow at this, because I did always ask them to run ideas past me before they wrote them, and for some authors this meant having more of an idea of what they were actually going to write than they perhaps would have without me there prodding them. So sometimes it is useful to have a bit of an idea, to make sure that you have a story that is pitchable (see my post on the benefits of thinking about the hook of your book upfront here), but really the magic happens when you’re writing.

You can have the best plan in the world, but if your characters decide they want to do something else… you should let them. Or perhaps you’ll get to a big reveal and realise that the person you had planned to be the killer shouldn’t be the killer at all – it should be someone else you hadn’t even considered before.

This is how I feel about plotting: it helps some authors, and it doesn’t help others. More than that, it helps some of the time, and not others. If you’re sitting staring at a blank page, or you keep starting writing but grinding to a halt, it might be worth having a go at plotting something in advance. Similarly, if you are halfway through a pantsed draft and stuck, doing some brainstorming on where to go next before you get back to writing might be useful. Or perhaps you’ll only find it useful to plot when you’ve already written a first draft, and you want to work out how to improve your novel (this is where reverse outlining, where you write down chapter by chapter what happens in your book, can be transformative).

Here is when I think plotting is not helpful:

• When you follow a strict plotting template and don’t allow yourself to deviate from it no matter what.

• When you spend so much time going over and perfecting your plan that you never actually get to the writing.

• When it’s sucking all the joy out of writing.

I cannot tell you whether to plot your book or not. I can tell you that, as long as you are getting words on the page and enjoying the process, the way you’ve chosen to write your book is working for you. (For now – you should feel free to flip between plotter vs pantser whenever you like.)

There are a million different plot templates you could follow and, much like the question of whether to plot at all, it’s really up to personal preference which one you use. But here are two plotting techniques I have seen many authors have lots of success with, which might be a good starting place if you’re stuck:

Save the Cat

This is a plot template which comes from the world of screenwriting, and there are a whole series of books – the relevant one for novels is Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, but you can find the template outline online. The gist of this technique is that you’re given a full breakdown of plot points your novel should hit, plus the percentage of the way through the book you should hit them, and then you can plug in your plot and make sure you have all the right elements.

Photo by Elin Melaas on Unsplash

I have to say that I have not always been a big fan of Save the Cat. For a while it felt like every outline authors sent me followed Save the Cat to the letter – to the extent that they left in all the plot point names like ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ and ‘The Bad Guys Close in’, which did rather have the effect of making every book sound exactly the same (and sound faintly ridiculous in my opinion). And that is the problem with Save the Cat! The whole point of it is that it is incredibly structured.

That said, I know a lot of authors who have found it incredibly helpful! If you are really stuck, or aren’t sure if your plot has enough momentum or enough twists or enough… plot, then Save the Cat will give you an incredibly thorough template to fit it into and see how it looks.

But please see this just as a starting point: you do not have to make the Bad Guys close in at exactly 32% of the way through the book, or whatever it is. Save the Cat can give you an idea of the rough path stories tend to follow (there are lots of great books on how similar the underlying plots of all novel/film storylines are – I like Into the Woods by John Yorke, if you are a story nerd), but if you try and shoehorn your plot into the precise Save-the-Cat structure you will likely lose all of the magic that comes when you let your characters and plot have a bit of space to develop during the writing phase. Save the Cat is a tool, but it is quite a blunt one.

Reverse outlining

As I mentioned above, this is a kind of plotting after the fact: you need a full draft to do it. The basic idea is that you write down, chapter by chapter, what happens, focusing on the main thread of the story (i.e. you don’t need to cover everything that happens, just the things that move the main storyline forward). Then you have a bird’s eye view of the book.

What you will find is that there are chapters where not a lot happens, or where what happens really only repeats the overall impact of a previous chapter, and so we don’t need the second one at all. You might find that there are long gaps where main characters or big plot points don’t get mentioned, so that the reader might forget what’s happening to them. Or you might see that you have chapter after chapter of high-octane action, and your poor readers might need a slightly slower paced chapter moving in between, to give them a bit of a rest.

I also find reverse outlining super helpful when editing books with more than one timeline, or more than one intertwined storyline. Until you can see, at a glance, where each story- or timeline is, it’s hard to see exactly how they are working together (especially if you are not, as you will not be, reading your novel for the first time). In a dual-timeline novel, you’ll want the two timelines to work together, so that we learn things in one timeline that push forward the story of the other and vice versa – and you won’t want to repeat things for the reader so that they learn them twice over.

Where you do sit on the plotter–pantser spectrum? Come to the comments and recommend me your favourite plotting techniques (or terrify me with your wild pantser ways if you too delete entire drafts)!

Happy writing,

Abi

1. Plotter and pantser are terms for those who plot and those who fly by the seat of their pants, respectively.