Writing System

A lot of my initial ideas for stories come from very tiny things, like dreams or a small "what-if" scenario in my head. I let these ideas sit in my brain and stew around in there a while, using this waiting period as a test to see if it's worth writing about, if it sticks around and grows like a crystal.

I work with this idea at first. What do I want the world to be like? How is the world different from this one, and how is it the same? What do people do for fun, what kind of jobs do they have? Very basic things like that. Wherever it's needed, I do real-world research like looking up encyclopedia information, reading books, or in extreme cases visiting a place to see what it's really like: how it feels and sounds and smells.

Once I have the initial idea and basic world laid out, I start putting together a cast of characters. Depending on the scope of the plot — the timescales I'm dealing with, how much of the "world" the plot will affect, how meaningful the character's actions — there may be a small number of characters if it's small-scale, or a large number if it's grander in scope. For a small number, as well as the "main characters" in a larger cast, I'll usually have around 4-6. I keep them roughly balanced between protagonists and antagonists. For a larger number, I'll add 5-10 more, but these will be minor characters; often there will be more antagonist characters than protagonists because it means the odds are against the good guys, so their eventual triumph is more satisfactory. Alternately, more protagonists than antagonists, so it seems they cannot fail, which can make their eventual demise more shocking.

The most important characters, I'll spend a lot of time with. I'll put together a background for them, a detailed personality, physical traits like height and weight and hair color. Sometimes I'll have an "interview" of sorts where I sit that character down and ask them to talk about themselves. While a lot of the details can and will change over the course of the novel (character development) this is what I start with and what I do not go back and change (retcon) because I don't like it. While the main characters will be very well developed, I'll usually reduce the minor characters to a single trait at first, like "lazy guy" or "sniveling rat" or "depressed teenager" or "very happy kid". As time goes on these characters will become more fleshed out, but it's not important at first because their job is to support the main characters.

Once I have these characters, I'll put together a rough sequence of events. This will evolve into an actual timeline later on, but at first it's just a few very basic things: the beginning, the end, several critical events that happen in the middle, but not every little thing. Picture a road trip across the USA, where you and a bunch of friends decided you're going to start in Los Angeles and end up in New York City; and visit Las Vegas, St. Louis, Chicago, and Philadelphia along the way; but you haven't decided exactly what roads you will take and what you'll do in between those places, or if you'll even stick together. It's a bit like that. Many of the large events are immovable because without them it would be an entirely different novel, but the small events are where the characters are completely in control.

Now, I shove all the characters into these events and just... see what they do. It's hard to describe how this works because it happens all by itself in my mind. I don't decide what is going to happen, but rather let the characters decide and take note of their actions like a neutral reporter. Given a certain situation, a character will act a certain way depending on the profile I've already put together for them. This can end up unpredictable. Sometimes characters will do things I don't expect or don't particularly want them to do. Sometimes I'll start out expecting a character will die only for them to survive, or expecting a character to leave forever only for them to dramatically return much later when someone they loved is in danger, or expecting a character to take a brave stand only for them to crumple in place in panic or cowardice. This is okay; you want this to happen; the characters should write the plot, not the other way around.

After a time with working on the critical events and seeing how they develop, the spaces between them begin to shrink, and the whole plot starts to become clear. The characters develop their own paths between the main events, sometimes splitting up and then getting back together. Enemies may become friends or vice versa; protagonists may meet antagonists several times, and some will win while others will lose. Some will die. Everyone has their own journey from the beginning to the end, and they twist and turn and cross and braid in ways completely out of my control.

Once this is done, the minor characters will have "asserted themselves" enough to have grown beyond their initial single personality trait. The main characters will have become entire people with wants and needs, dreams and fears, personal patterns of speech and foibles, favorite types of clothing and foods, etc. The timeline will get hammered into finished shape, often down to the specific day. The plot will get refined and then cut into larger parts divided by tone and plot progression, and then each part further divided into easily-digestible chunks (for me, this is usually enough to make a chapter between 2500 and 4500 words, which is a length I prefer as it's what I like to write in a single sitting, though everyone is different with this). Each chapter is usually made up of three or four "events" that I have a good idea what will happen in, what the characters will do and whatnot. With just those events, usually I'll come up with a title for each part and for each chapter within that part. Now is a good time to come up with a name for the entire story, which is one of the most difficult things for me, personally. I want to consider the entire piece before I title it.

By now, I've got an entire folder of written documents cluttering up my computer. A document for the good guys, one for the bad guys, one for a group of other characters, a scribbled family tree, a map of the world with edits drawn on it, a sequence of events, a prototype timeline, a finished timeline, interviews with the characters, supplementary information about a fictional species, a summary of a short sequence of events where the exact details are important to keep just that way... just pages and pages and pages of assorted stuff.

But you'll note that I haven't actually written anything yet. But now I have all that I need to do so; writer's block is nearly impossible when everything is laid out for me; all that's left is to sit down and report what has happened.

This part, for me, has always seemed like magic. I brush up on the information, I review the events that are going to happen in Chapter 1 (or the prologue, as the case may be), I think about what the characters will do (or rather, have already done), and then I sit down and start writing. And it really is fucking magic; I'm not kidding. I barely even have to think, and the chapter just writes itself. The ideas flow unimpeded from my mind to my fingers and to the keyboard. At any time, I'm only barely aware of the sentences and paragraphs, the quotations, the flow of the plot from event to event. Sometimes I stop for a moment or two if I'm not sure how exactly to proceed, but I figure it out quickly. All I really know is after about three hours my butt and back hurt and my eyes ache and the chapter is done. I save it and put it aside. It's important to let it sit on its own for a while; don't go back and review it or edit it that day.

The next day I'll run it through a basic edit, cleaning up the format and proofreading the grammar and spelling and whatnot (which is usually quite a mess as I'm writing nearly in a trance). If there's any obvious plot holes, I'll patch them. This isn't a lot of work because right now it's just a tiny piece of a puzzle that isn't finished yet; I don't know how it's going to fit so I can't refine the shape further. I once again set it aside, and then start the process over with Chapter 2; then I do Chapter 3, and then Chapter 4, and so on and so forth.

Once all the chapters are done, months and months later, I put it all together and read the whole thing through, making notes along the way of issues, smaller plot holes, any time a character isn't acting exactly like he should, or any parts that I just think are written badly or unclearly. Now begins the REAL hard work. I go back and start making big changes to fix these issues; in minor cases I might just have to add a few paragraphs to make a point clear or patch a plot hole; in extreme cases an entire chapter might get thrown out completely and rewritten from scratch. This is also a good place to start editing away anything irrelevant: if it's not absolutely critical to the plot, or if it's not the right tone, or if I've caught myself proselytizing or ranting about something instead of just reporting the events, it gets chopped out. Some chapters might get rearranged to flow better, some might get chopped to pieces and reassembled in order to shift focus to other characters in the right places.

Now that I have what could be called a beta version of the novel, I'll start the task of polishing it. This is things like adding in a character's little foibles across the story, having a chapter written in a certain way to convey a certain tone, making sure a character's dialogue has its own consistency of style, adding tidbits of worldbuilding here and there. Often I'll even do really nitpicky stuff like formatting paragraphs certain ways to draw the reader's eye where I want it to (fooling him sometimes), putting in Easter Eggs or references to other novels, adding real-world quotations or references, grooming the novel's vocabulary to fit with the slang and tone of the world it's set in. These are tiny things, so tiny that they won't even be particularly noticed at times, but act like the little imperfections and color variations that separate the face of a human from the face of a robot, making the work come alive.

Finally, I'll run it through a few more edits for the grammar and spelling, get someone I trust to read it in case they notice anything I did not, and fix all those mistakes. I'll do a final runthrough of the grammar, making sure its consistent to my own personal manual of style, making sure the sentences flow logically, making sure words aren't repeated, things like that. Now it's actually at a point where I can call it finished, though depending on a lot of factors I might still come back later and poke at it. I'm rarely completely satisfied, but I recognize there is a diminishing return with further edits.


Now, as I've said, I don't do all of this for every little thing I do. Often it's just a few things.

Like right now, I'm toying with an idea for a furry-themed short story (set in the much larger canon of the world where my fursona exists) that will probably only be 3-5 short chapters in length. I've put in about two hours of work so far coming up with a cast of characters (only four protagonists, one "antagonist", and one kid at the end who ends up holding the ball, so to speak) and a few locations where the major plot events take place. There is also a small amount of information I researched regarding the real-world conditions of these locations (it's on Titan, a moon of Saturn, so things like the gravity, temperature, length of day/night, average winds, chemical composition of atmosphere, etc). Already the names of one these places have crystallized into an unexpected sub-plot that feeds into one of the characters and melds well with the mythology I'm creating. I still have to put together the sequence of events and then put the characters in there, which I anticipate being only a few more hours of work.

So that's the "process" of planning that will only take around five hours. Compare this to a full novel where the process may take five months. In the end I'll probably have only one document of reference material instead of a dozen. I also anticipate only doing a couple of edits to the final product (as opposed to four or more) which will also cut down on the time. If I wanted to, I could complete the entire thing in a week given only a few hours per day.

Nevertheless, you can see that I'm still following the entire basic process! The initial idea, then the worldbuilding (which I mostly could skip as it's already been largely established from other stories I've written about the same canon), then the research on the real-world places, then the cast of characters (a small number for a small story), then the sequence of events, then letting the characters loose in those events to see what they do. Only then will I actually start writing it and later editing it.

Anyway, good luck with your projects. Once again, keep in mind that this is just my process; I'd advise you to only follow the basic ideas (world before characters before plot before writing!) and develop your own preferred system in time.