Category: Writing

Fiction writers fiercely debate whether or not you should plan your story before writing it. Seat-of-the-pants writers argue planning your book is more likely to create a mechanical, paint-by-numbers story driven by plot, not character. Mainstream, commercial fiction or plot-heavy genres like mysteries can and even should be planned out to the tiniest detail, but “real,” literary fiction should be created one sentence, one word at a time. Get a great character and just let them do what they want. It’s more pure, more magical, more creative. It’s also more chaotic, more frustrating, and more time-consuming.

For most of my life, I’ve been a seat-of-the-pants writer. I rebelled against the idea of planning my stories, of laying them them out like a blueprint or, even worse, an essay for school. I’d have an idea where I was going and I’d point my characters in that direction and start writing, with no idea how to get them to their destination. As a result, they often wandered off the path, finding diversions and deciding maybe they didn’t want to go where I told them and maybe this place over here was more interesting. As anyone who’s ever been in a writers’ group or workshop with me can tell you, this method led me to a lot of dead ends and a lot of rewriting. I have finished a couple of novels over the years, but many more have either fallen apart in the early stages because I didn’t know where I was going, or have so many versions that even I can’t keep them all straight. I can write up to a hundred pages before I hit a dead end or an amazing new idea that seems so much better than the original pops up. It wastes time, and it’s demoralizing.

I was so frustrated with the way things were going that when I stumbled across Karen Wiesner’s First Draft in Thirty Days, I decided to give it a shot. I used it to work through my fantasy novel Sable (I use the main character’s name as shorthand for my stories), which I originally began about fifteen years ago when I was in high school. After failing to find a plot worthy of the character, I put her aside, telling myself I would come back when I was a better, more mature writer. A couple of years ago I decided it was time to try again, but even though I had progressed with the plot and the characters I was still struggling.

Unfortunately, I can’t give Wiesner’s method a definitive thumbs up or down yet, because I didn’t fully utilize it for Sable. The novel’s structure is a frame, with the events of the past revealed during a trial that takes place in the present. I used Wiesner’s methods to lay out the characters and settings and plot points of the outer frame, the “current” events, but I left the bulk of the story, what happens in the past, uncharted. I had some idea of the major events in Sable’s life and had even written some of the scenes, so I figured that was good enough. It was a way for me to have my cake and eat it too. I had used the book to plot out some of my book, while leaving some to the magical “let’s write it and see what happens” method.

A couple of years later, I have only just come up with a workable plot to fill in the gaps, and I’ve ended up having to lay it out ahead of time to do it. I can’t help but wonder if I would be done by now if I had actually followed Wiesner’s method for the entire novel.

My new vampire story will be, for me, the real litmus test for Wiesner’s approach. Since it’s a brand new idea, I’ll be using her book all the way through the process. I’ll chart my progress here, so if nothing else, it should be a fairly thorough road test of Wiesner’s book.

Back in January, prompted by the idea that our ancestors might have interbred with Neanderthals, I wrote a single line in a document called “Vampire Idea.” What if, instead of being demons or supernatural beings or victims of viruses or experimentation, vampires were just another branch in the human family tree? I thought about this for a while, what human history might look like if this were the case, how vampires might have survived when other branches like the Neanderthals died out, and though I didn’t write it down, the idea that most stuck with me was that there was a very good chance that, in this world, the humans might be the bad guys.

I put the idea aside because I have other stories I’m working on, but a recent article on Salon.com enumerating the various worlds of urban fantasy and especially the similarities of the vampire inhabitants of these worlds brought it back to the front of my mind. My vampires are not “upper-class — rich, well-dressed, owners of nightclubs and vast yet shadowy business interests.” They are not power-brokers and rulers of the darkness. I’m sure the books profiled in the article are very good and I will probably end up reading a number of them (not to mention, I’ve written my fair share of stories about these kinds of vampires), but my story is different, and the article fanned my desire to pursue it.

One thing the Salon article did give me, other than a renewed desire to start exploring this world, was the idea of a young female character through whose eyes we would see the story unfold. Lex is a college freshman about to find herself in the middle of the escalating struggle over vampire rights. The idea of using a character like this as the narrator is not new to writing in general or me in particular (she is, essentially, the same character as Kat in my short story “After the fire”), but hopefully the story she’s telling will be.