Seat of Your Pants: The start

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by! All month long, we’re talking about writing by the seat of your pants—primarily because I’ve been asked these questions more times than I can count, and I thought answering them in here might be the best way to go about it. This way, I can point you all back to the blog, if you have these questions in the future. ;-)

So far in our series, we’ve come up with our idea and we’ve just barely started writing, just enough that we have our concept figured out and know what our world looks like (particularly if we’re writing sci-fi, fantasy, or an otherworldly genre of that nature)—and if you’ve missed any of it, I highly recommend that you click over there and check out the prior posts!

Today? We’re really getting the ball rolling.

Seat of Your Pants: The start

Obviously, once you’ve gotten your idea, started rolling with it, and conceptualized everything, the next step is just to write. But I think this is the part that a lot of people struggle to understand, which is why I wanted to take this entire post to talk about it. If you’ve ever written, or if you took any writing courses in the past, then you’ve probably outlined. So you’re used to having a map, a direction in which to go, and you have an idea of what you’re really writing. But if you’re like me, you might have struggled with it, along the way. If you’re anything like me, then you maybe even wrote your stories, outlined them after, and pretended that wasn’t what you did.

But I think that’s beside the point.

For seat of your pants writers, really, we just start writing. We start from the spot where we think the story begins, and just go. I know a great many authors who stop writing in the middle of a scene, so they can jump right back into it when they come back—and this is an extremely useful tip, if you want to try writing like this. Whatever it takes, really, to make sure the story still goes.

Why? Because it’s easier to let your book go by the wayside, when you don’t have an outline to keep you going, and sometimes we get off track and need to make little ways to get ourselves back on it.

For me, chapter maps are a useful venture, and a great way to keep me on pace while I’m writing. It’s a little like an outline, only without really being an outline at all, and without my ever really sticking to them, in the end. Which probably sounds useless, but hey, it works for me so I’ll keep using it.

A chapter map is where I’ll sit down and “decide” how many scenes I’d like, in the chapter I’m about to write. I usually start with four, and build up or down from there. I use Scrivener, so I make a file for each one of those scenes, and I write a little blurb of what information I’d like to cover in that scene—because at this point, my head is usually farther ahead than my hands. So I’ll write down what needs to happen in this chapter, guesstimating how many words I think each scene will be (since I like my chapters to be equal in length), and then I’ll sit down to write the chapter.

But like I said, those chapter maps are really… they’re iffy, as to whether I follow them or not. Usually, the information I want to convey will be conveyed, but I don’t generally write it the way I originally thought I would.

I know, confusing, but it makes sense to me, and that’s what matters. If you hate chapter maps, don’t use them. If you hate outlines, don’t use them. But if you love both, by all means, use both! Find what works for you, and use it—just make sure you write, if you’re going to write.

[love]

{Rani Divine}