Seat of Your Pants: The conceptualization

Hey everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. If you were here last week, then you know we’re talking about writing by the seat of your pants. We’re talking… how on earth do you write a story without an outline? And we’re talking about this because of the vast number of times I’ve been asked these questions. I guess people think all writers outline their stories? I don’t know, but whatever the case, I thought we’d take the month to discuss how I write, and how, in general, seat of your pants writers, write.

Last week, we talked about getting an idea and rolling with it—and if you’re curious what that’s like, be sure to go back and check out last week’s post!

This week, the tale continues…

Seat of Your Pants: The conceptualization

Now that we’ve gotten our idea and started playing with it, we have to move forward with the story. Obvious, no?

I don’t know if all seat of your pants writers do this part. I really don’t. But it’s what I do, and it makes the most sense to me, so let’s discuss. Now that I have my idea, now that I’ve rolled with it a bit and know what I’m doing, what I’m talking about, and have a little idea of the story I’m setting out to write, I’ll take some time and write down my concept.

It's not outlining, don’t worry.

During this time, what I’m trying to do is flesh things out and get my ducks in a row, so I don’t have two characters who give conflicting information about the world in general. Oh, and by this time, I’ve probably written between 16,000-50,000 words. That’s only a few chapters, for me. I know, I write really long stories… I’m not sorry.

Anyway, what I do during the conceptualization phase is that I’ll write down all the information I now know about the world in which I’m writing, and I’ll make a file of it so I can refer back to these things as I continue writing my story.

It’s in this phase that I really decide what things look like, where things are, and sometimes I’ll even set down a little bit of the history of the story, so I have it for future reference. This becomes very useful for me when I get past the 50,000 word point, which is why I always make sure to do this before I reach that word count.

In the conceptualization phrase, I try to immerse myself in my world, as I know it at that point. I immerse myself within it, and I discover what it’s like, from every angle, to live inside this world. I need to know what it’s like to live here, what people think and act like, and what I can expect from the future of my story.

For some authors, I’m sure that’s something you’d like to do sooner. Especially if you’re an outliner, I’m sure you can’t even imagine what it’s like to not really conceptualize until you’re this far into your story—but you know what? We all do what we have to do, in order to get the stories out of our noggins.

Next week, we’ll really get going!

[love]

{Rani Divine}

Seat of Your Pants: The idea

Hey guys, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. As it’s now March (how did that happen?), it’s time for a new series! And I’ve chosen something that I think you’ll all really enjoy. It’s something I actually get a lot of questions about, from many of you. I think because it’s not something many people really think of, when they think of writing. Sure, writers know what this is and a little bit of how it works, but other people don’t. And some of you, I’m sure, aren’t actually writers.

So let’s talk about writing by the seat of your pants.

That’s how I write.

See, there are two main ways of writing a novel. There’s the outline method, which I’m really not adept at telling you about, because I don’t use it. And there’s what I like to call the “seat of your pants” method, which I know a great deal about—because that’s the way I write. The majority of writers either use an outline or they don’t, but for those of you who cannot fathom writing without an outline, stay tuned. I’ll tell you all about it, over the month of March.

Seat of Your Pants: The idea

Usually, writing always starts with an idea. Whether you’re outlining or pantsing, it always starts with an idea. If you don’t have an idea, then you probably don’t really know what you want to write about. But that’s beside the point.

We seat of your pants writers often come up with an idea, and we think, “oh, that could be a cool story”—but it’s from there that things get different.

Unlike outliners, who would then (I assume) sit down and come up with an outline for their idea before they start writing, pantsers just start writing. We just type up the idea we had, and we roll with it. We see where it takes us.

Sometimes that means we’ll write a few lines, delete them, and rewrite the same lines with slightly different wording. Sometimes it means that we’ll just sit down and flow out more words than we know what to do with—and that’s what we’re usually hoping for. More words are better than less, when you’re writing by the seat of your pants. We want more words, because if you have too many words, you can always cut them. It’s harder to add words, after the fact.

I don’t know if this is true for all seat of your pants writers, but for me, this part is all about discovery. It’s about meeting some characters, whether they be our primary characters or not, and getting to know the world a little bit.

It can also be a challenge, which I often enjoy, because sometimes the idea we have is for later in a story, or for what we think might be the end of a story, and so we have to backtrack and think of a beginning that we think might match with the ending we’ve thought of—and to be honest, I’m not often right. I have a whole pile of endings that I would love to use someday, that I’ve backtracked from in an effort to give the story a really good start, but none of them worked out the way I wanted. And you know what? That honestly made it a lot more fun.

That’s how it begins. That’s where we start from. We get an idea, and we roll with it—wherever it takes us, whatever shape it turns into. And we love the discovery of it, the experience of finding out what this idea can turn into along the way. Why? Because it’s very rarely what we thought it would be, when we started.

And how fun is that?

[love]

{Rani Divine}

Writing Cleanly: Realistic dialogue

Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me in Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. :) All month long, we’ve been talking about writing clean fiction, and the things that are sometimes difficult for clean writers to get right. There’s a stigma against clean writing, one that says if you’re writing cleanly, you’re not writing well—and that just doesn’t have to be the case. Sure, we have to be a little more picky with the way we word things, with the amount of details we give when it comes to certain topics, but that doesn’t mean we have to compromise in terms of story. (which, by the by, is RAD Writing’s motto)

This week, for the end of our series, I chose a topic very unlike the rest of the topics in this series. I chose this topic because it’s something that I see in writing in general, but something that clean writers get a bad rap for, more than others. It’s something that I pride myself in being quite good at—and so it’s something I like to share about, whenever I have the chance.

Writing Cleanly: Realistic dialogue

It’s difficult, I know. While exposition often flows off our fingertips like fine silk, dialogue comes out clunky, overly wordy (or underly), and just plain wrong. It happens to the best of us, whether we’re clean writers or not—but there’s one aspect in particular, for which clean writers get a really bad rap. And that's where I'll place my focus, today.

When real people talk, they curse.

And clean writing avoids cursing, at all costs.

And you should! If you’re writing clean fiction, then you should avoid cursing. Please. Clean readers don’t want to read cursing, no matter how you’ve written it. They don’t want those words in exposition, and they certainly don’t want those words in dialogue. But there are a great many non-clean readers who expect to see cursing, because it’s in their day-to-day.

Personally, I don’t see what the problem is. As long as you’re writing good dialogue, realistic dialogue in general, then the curse words aren’t necessary at all. The vast majority of the time, in any sentence that includes a curse word, that curse word could be removed without altering the sentence in the slightest. So, why does it matter if we don’t write them? It’s beside the point though, because the argument has already been made and lost. Readers, even clean one sometimes, want characters to be fully realistic. Which means that some of them really ought to curse.

That being the case, I have two fairly simple options for you, for including curse words in your writing (without actually including any):

“He/she cursed.”

Easy, right? And it actually works rather well, most of the time. In many stories, especially sci-fi/fantasy, it bothers me when “normal” curse words show up in dialogue at all—because what are the odds that curse words are exactly the same on this world as they are right now, and on Earth? Maybe these people think hands are offensive, so they use hands as a curse. It just works better, in these cases, to use phrasing like “he/she cursed”—because then the reader can infer from the line before, what the curse was involving.

A new set of deity

This one is my personal favorite, and it works extremely well when you’re writing fantasy—but can work in alternate Earths as well. Make up a new set of gods, and use their names when people are cursing! Brilliant, eh? AC Schafer did it extremely well in The Wraith and the Wielder, if you ask me. Tsaw rahk, her characters say, when they’re cursing. And the meaning of it isn’t lost. We all know they’re cursing. We all know it’s a curse. But none of us are turned off by it, because that’s not a curse in reality. If you said that to someone, they’d probably just ask you to repeat yourself, because they didn’t understand what you said.

These, my friends, are my two favorite ways to include cursing in story, without ever actually including a curse word. And sure, there are times and places when a “minor” curse or two can be appropriate in your writing, but most clean readers don’t want to see any at all—which makes these methods far more appropriate when you’re writing in this arena.

Have something specific you’d like an opinion on, when it comes to cursing in clean fiction? Send me a message and let me know! I’d love to help!

In the meantime, have a lovely week—I’ll be back in March, with a whole new series!

[love]

{Rani Divine}