Forget the Pants, I'm Wearing a Skirt

Note: This post is a little rambley, because I didn’t get to edit it enough and wrote it while sleep deprived at my meat puppet job.

It’s high time I’ve talked about the novel I’m writing. Basic facts: It’s a YA fantasy about a girl named Alex who finds a door to a different world. It’s been in my head in some form or another for 3 years.

I officially started writing it last August, got 15000 words in, and then had to start over because the tone was completely off. I’m 15000 words in again to my 2nd 1st draft and I realized that I’m going to have to rewrite most of it because Alex's motivation is all wrong.

I shouldn’t be surprised. I saw it coming. Her reasons for her actions were very flimsy, and mostly based off of somebody else’s. I’d tried to think more deeply about it before, but didn’t have any easy answers so I let it drop.

All this rewriting doesn’t bum me out because these changes are for the better, and I can already see the story improving. It just makes much more sense.

At the same time, they show that I clearly need to do more planning than I’ve been doing. If I have to write the story over each time I have a narrative revelation this novel is going to take a while.

I’m not against planning. It just never seems to work out well. I think the reason I have a problem with it is that it's hard for me to think through a whole story if I’m not writing something of it. I mean, let’s say I want to think about a character's backstory and motivation. I’ll just arbitrarily make something up that doesn’t make sense or go with the story.

I think I may need to plan something, then do some draft scenes and see how they work.

So, back to the drawing board (literally). I’ve got to figure out a way to plot/plan some of this book before I keep writing, and not ignore the problems I come across. I see posterboard in my future.

This is a guy who knows how to plan.

I’m also going to take some time to dissect a book (my fav one) to figure out pacing. Word count means nothing to me. I'm going to try to answer these questions: What number of words/percentage of the book should be dedicated to the intro to the character/world/conflict? When do we start getting answers to our initial questions? When does the action pick up? When is the climax?

Obviously, these numbers are different for each book, but I want to have a ballpark, something I can work with.

What about you? Are you a pantser or a plotter? Do you use any fancy graphic organizers to plan?