Plotting, Pantsing, and Process
At this time of year, it feels as if half my friends are sweltering in late-summer heat, while the rest are shuddering in last-minute wintry blasts. Technically, it's spring in Aotearoa. The plum trees and daffodils certainly think so. Myself, I'm unconvinced. I slept for longer than I usually manage last night, but dragging myself out of bed was much tougher.1
Today I've got some news, and then a long, and hopefully interesting musing on process. Enjoy!
XO, Xena is now in paperback, which means two things:
- Your local library can order it!
- The ebook is shortly going to be moved out of general availability and into Kindle Unlimited. If you would like to purchase an e-copy from a non-Amazon retailer, now's the time!
I do fiddly paperback cover upload things just often enough to think that this time, I will surely remember how it goes, and not often enough that I actually do remember. One day! One day! But not today.
Patreon, Patreon, yes, I have a Patreon (you have to imagine this to the Spider-Man theme. Trust me: click that link.)
I am delighted with the Patreon support, which is currently sitting on $96.10/month - which means roughly $50/month goes to me.
That's enough to pay some vital writing monthly expenses and has encouraged me to add milestone goals! Short version: if I make more money from Patreon I will write a serial story, voted on by the Patreon members, available to all tiers.
Plotting, Pantsing and Process
I spent the last writing week working on my book (genuinely) without doing much writing at all.
I am neither a plotter (with a detailed synopsis) or a pantser (write by the seat of the your pants!) but a "let's enjoy the journey" writer. When I start a book, I know where I'm starting from, I know some of the things we're going to visit along the way, and I know more or less where I want to end up, although I'm prepared to change that if another destination looks more interesting as we draw closer.
And all of that is informed by genre and base material. The first three books of Olympus Inc. are all contemporary romances with a base of Greek mythology. Romance as a genre expects a couple who are together by the end of the book, with internal and external conflicts that prevent them from being together at the beginning of the book. With the myths, I was either leaning into a modern interpretation of tropes and story, or deliberately leaning hard away from them.
So I knew, for example, that in Persephone in Bloom, Persephone would be a newcomer to Olympus Inc. and Hades would be a senior manager with a lot of power and responsibility. Mythical Hades works in the underworld, among all of the treasures of the earth; my Hades is the Chief Financial Officer, running the Finance department in the basement. That's leaning in!
But the mythical Hades abducts Persephone--his niece--and their relationship is coercive and non-consensual. That very much does not fit the genre expectations of a contemporary romantic comedy! Gotta lean out of that one: I knew that while Hades was definitely going to fall first and fall hard, Persephone would be enthusiastically into him, and her hesitation would have nothing to do with Hades himself, and everything to do with her narcissistic mother, and her own desire to be, and be seen as, an independent person.
This was all stuff I knew before I typed a single word, which is why I'm not a true pantser.
But the actual course of that relationship isn't something I knew before I started writing. I didn't know they would go to a restaurant where Persephone falls in love with the salad dressing, or that they'd attend an avant-garde play they both hated2 and leave at the intermission so they could make out in the basement garage. I knew there'd be a winter solstice celebration of some kind that moved their relationship along, but I didn't know that it was going to set up all three relationships for that arc until I was like, hm, now might be a good time to introduce the third brother, and also Aphrodite is here?
I knew Persephone needed a best friend who could see exactly what her mother was, but Hecate leapt right out of the keyboard as a snarky Goth lawyer. (One of the sad things about finishing Olympus Inc. a little before I would have preferred is that I might not get to write the Hecate/Terry story. Or the Hermes/Hestia story. Or the Megara/Semele story, and yes, I know you haven't met Penny's best friend Meg on the page but believe me she is so cool. Sign up to my Patreon!) I knew that Demeter would be frantic to keep possession of her daughter, but not exactly what she'd do in order to get her back. I knew that Hades would be terrified of heights, but not what use Zeus would make of that secret.
Sometimes those moments emerge very naturally while I'm writing, and sometimes I have to stop and think about what, actually, is going to happen next, and that's what happened last week.
Currently, I'm writing Magician First Class, the first book of the Sparks and Recreation series. This is an urban fantasy (genre) loosely inspired by an Urban Shadows game that I GMed for some awesome friends last year (base material). (I kind of hoped playing the game would stop me from needing to write the book, and ahahahahahaha NOPE.)
Thanks to running that game, when I started writing, I knew who a lot of the characters were, and I knew what the first major obstacle would be. I have also been given generous carte blanche to do whatever I want with my players' characters. This is great! I'm probably going to kill at least one of them.
But collaborative, ensemble story-telling with dice influence on success and failure isn't the same process as writing an urban fantasy novel with a first person PoV protagonist where I get to decide all the outcomes. There are a lot of changes, the most obvious being Charlie's central place in the story, when she didn't exist at all in the game.
My trickier moments so far have been thematic, rather than strictly narrative. Urban Shadows is a game where your players might be okay with doing something dodgy in the moment that the characters I'm writing might not embrace, or at least not embrace for the same reasons. I hit a knotty ethical moment in Magician First Class where I had to stop writing and step away from the keyboard to think about where I wanted to take the story.
It is important that my protagonist can't be perfectly moral and making good choices all the time. For one thing, Charlie is 23 years old2. For another, a genre expectation for urban fantasy is that the characters will make choices and facing consequences that aren't always ideal. For a third, I've deliberately put her in a complicated situation where there isn't actually one right answer.
So I did some sewing and some thinking about how to articulate that process, and landed on one of my favourite techniques, where you place the protagonist in the middle of an argument between two other parties. They're all on the same side, but one party is arguing in favour of the practical, but potentially problematic route, and the other is nobly insisting that this route is ethically unfeasible, and that there must be another way.
And then they leave the final choice to the protagonist.
Me, cackling wildly as Charlie agonises over the choice: "Sooooo what if now there was a startling revelation that ups the stakes?"
Tertiary character, barging into the space: "GUYS, COME QUICK, YOU GOTTA SEE THIS!!"
And then the plot carried merrily on from there. I've got about 20k to go - we're in the final act, and things are about to get messy.
I can't wait.
1 Shortly after writing this I realised that what I thought was winter lethargy was a fun winter head cold. I had to cancel all my plans in favour of burrowing into my bed, occasionally emerging to morosely chew on a brownie.
2 It's always fun to imagine how different characters would react to the same situation. I think Aphrodite would have found that play really interesting, Heph would have been politely baffled, Hera would have picked two things to compliment for when someone inevitably asked for her opinion, and Don would have stopped listening after three minutes and passed the time mentally redesigning the set.
3When I think about some of the choices I made at 23...