To Plot or Not to Plot

Authors generally fall into one of two categories, those who plot or those who don't. When I first started my writing career, I admit that I fell firmly into the latter camp. However, having listened to advice from the bestselling romance novelist, Sue Moorecroft, and the fabulous crime writer A.A.Dhand, I have come to believe that plotting novels has more advantages than disadvantages. I know it won't work for everybody, but it works for me. Let me tell you why.

The one thing that worries me most is the shadow of writer's block. I remember discussing it with my mentor, the late great Peter Robinson, and he told me that, if writing was my job, than I could not afford the luxury of succumbing to writer's block and had to work through the first hint of it. The only way to do this, he thought, was to write, write, write. I admit that while I view my writing as work, it is work I very much enjoy. So even before I began plotting, I would make brief notes to tell myself the direction that I wanted my story to go. I find that this helps to keep me on track. These bullet points give me a route map for the story and something to aim for.

Now, my outlines are much more detailed and include not just what I need to happen in each chapter, but which characters will advance the action, but also where it will take place. It is important that every chapter in your book earns its place and I find that a detailed outline allows me to avoid a mucky middle to my novel that I wrote about last week.

Of course, even when I write detailed notes, there are occasions when my characters seem to take off in unexpected directions and lead my story away from my outline in ways that I hadn't anticipated. I find it exciting when this happens. Indeed, some of my plot twists occur to me when my characters divert from my script. This has never restricted my story line. I simply change my outline!

I have also found that writing an outline gives me an overview of the story before I start writing the book itself. This helps me to avoid dead ends in my narratives; you know the ones where characters get written into a scene from which they can't escape. It is much easier to tackle a weak spot or inconsistency in the narrative before work on the novel itself begins.

One of the other things that writing the outline helps with is writing the synopsis. This is an aspect of writing that I never enjoy. I doubt you like it any more than I do. What I do now is, rather than working my way through the whole manuscript to produce a synopsis, I use the outline I produced (and amended when my characters went off script) as the basis for my synopsis.

I know that I will not persuade everybody of the value of an outline. There are those who believe it restricts their creativity and they like to tell the story to themselves as they go along. I appreciate that approach. I like to discover all the twists and turns of my novels too, especially when the characters take matters into their own hands. Then, as I say, even a plotter may need to change the outline.

So I will continue to create outlines for my books as they help me to structure my story, but I will continue to amend the outline as necessary. Perhaps I am not a pure plotter, but retain a bit of the pantser in me even after all these years.