Err...Characters!!!

The possible rejection of doing IT might bring you MISERY, RAGE and INSOMNIA, or if you were lucky you might be in JOYLAND.

I know the feeling. Pesky characters! Who do they think they are? You name them, give them -istics, speech, motives, and are they satisfied? Hell, no!

This, I suppose, is an argument for being an outliner - keep the buggers in their place.


Thanks for introducing these terms, Seegee.

I started out a pantser (an apt word for TTWD), adjusting plots and characteristics in retrospect to accommodate the whims of my characters as they hijacked my imagination. Pantsing is such a buzz (flying's the key word) that it can lead to a lengthy serial, although some outlining becomes unavoidable the further you go into multiple plots.

Yes, that's pretty much the way things are for me. I work on multiple stories simultaneously, adding bits at a time until they're finished. Then I add them to a file listing the stories in chronological order of completion.

Once they're finished some get submitted here right away but I've got some that are pushing 2 years old that I keep passing over whenever I'm sending submissions. Frankly I know I'm a better writer than I was when I created them so that makes it easier to pick something newer and shiny instead. But I finally decided to pull a few of the "best of the worst" stories from the bottom of the list for submission, so a couple of my Latest Loaded are from that latter category. They're not great stories but at least they're finally seeing the light of day.

I don't see the two as mutually exclusive. I tend to have an outline of some kind before I begin. In fact, most....though not all......stories are written in my head before I start typing. Outlines help keep things organized and prevent rambling too far from the story's purpose. However.....within that outline....I have found that allowing a character a bit of meandering helps keep them feeling alive and fresh. This also does not mean that a structure always remains intact. If the actual writing reveals flaws in the overall outline, the outline can shift or even change direction. So having an outline doesn't mean the outline can't change.

But a lot depends on one's stories, their purpose, the theme, the desire for a twist, etc.

It happens to everybody. I just saw a show where they had clearly detailed which location each suspect was located only to reverse two of them later in the same hour. Needless to say neither were guilty.

I make notes... Sometimes I'll use an outline, but I always have those notes.

At least a list of names - because it's embarrassing not being able to remember if someone was Steven or Stephen. Looking things like that up will break my train of thought. Often I will name everyone before starting the story and have a list of extra names in case another character pops his/her head in.

If there's a name of a business I'll include that in the list - along with schools, cities, towns, counties, groups, nicknames, and anything else I'm likely to repeat. If a character's clothes are important then that goes into the notes - there's nothing worse than someone being in shorts at the start of a scene and getting her skirt raised ten minutes later... Okay, there is something worse. The time I was working on two similar stories at once and halfway through switch the character names - and didn't notice until after I had posted one of them.

But notes, they really, really help with those things.

I tend to start with an idea for an ending, a scene or a plot twist and write towards it (for this to happen, what must have happened first?) or (if that just happened, what's likely to happen next?).

Of course, sometimes by the time I reach the point I was writing towards, the scene I first imagined doesn't fit or something better has occurred to me...!