RITA ® Award-Winning Author of Fantasy Romance
//The TWISTED MAGIC audiobook is live! Also sharing a call for authors influenced by Tanith Lee. And why I think classes teaching “plotting for pantsers” are damaging to intuitive writers, and other thoughts on process.
//Great week for me! Talking about being up front with my new editor on how I *can’t* write an outline, a bit about knife-throwing and learning to relish failure as much as success, and the monsoon rains of autumn.
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This week at the SFF Seven, we’re talking about Managing Word Count. Do we rewrite to hit a certain number? Do we have a chapter/scene word allotment?
So, a lot of you know that one of my nicknames is the Meticulous Volcano. This comes from me being born on the Leo/Virgo cusp, which a friend informed me makes me a meticulous volcano and they’re not wrong. I really am half and half – and this shows up in many ways. Yes, I have the passionate Leo nature, but I’m also the detail-oriented lover of spreadsheets. In my writing, this manifests in my total, far-end gardener/pantser/write for discovery process, which I track down to the tiniest detail, with charts.
Do I have a chapter/scene word allotment? Yes, I do. It varies from book to book – something I land on intuitively – with some books and series running to longer chapters and some to shorter. The shortest chapters, which creates a brisker pace, are generally about 6-7 pages long, or about 1,700 words. Longer chapters give a more epic feel, a more luxurious pace, and can be as long as 23 pages (my record) and about 7K words long. On average, however, I keep longer chapters to around 16 pages or 4,500 words.
For scenes, I follow the 3-Act 8-scene structure, which looks like this:
| Act 1 | Scene 1 | 12.5% | Initial set-up, establishing shot, life before | |
| Act 1 climax | Scene 2 | 25.0% | All stakes are set | |
| Act 2 | Scene 3 | 37.5% | ||
| Midpoint | Scene 4 | 50.0% | Midpoint pivot | |
| Scene 5 | 62.5% | |||
| Act 2 climax | Scene 6 | 75.0% | All is lost | |
| Scene 7 | 87.5% | often the same as Act III climax | ||
| Act 3 climax | 90.0% | Final climax | ||
| Scene 8 | 100.0% | Denouement, life after | ||
Mostly I use this structure as a series of guideposts, to know where I am as I write the book, which is always linear, from beginning to end. And this helps me to predict when I’ll finish. Once I have Scene 1 complete, I can predict the final word count (8 times the word count of Scene 1). This number is solidified once I have Act 1 in place. Generally my books are 85K – 120K words long, so how long the individual segments are varies from about 11K to 15K words.
In truth, “segment” is probably a better word than “scene,” as applies to my novels. This structure is from screenwriting, so scenes can be more or less a single sequence. For me, a scene in this context is a contiguous segment of the story, one where a particular mini-arc is begun and completed.
As for rewriting to tighten the shape? Sometimes I do that. Usually not. I often worry that some segment will bulge out and need trimming, but it usually is fine by the end. Sometimes I break up chapters or trim parts that go on too long. Mostly I let the numbers be a loose guideline and I decided intuitively how to edit.
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Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is, verbatim, On Your Mind (Winter).
So, I’m posting a photo I took this morning from the winter garden. We’ve had a mild winter, and the secret garden is walled and makes a protected microclimate, so I actually have a winter garden.
Some of you may know that I love to garden. I mention it in interviews when I’m asked what I do that isn’t reading or writing. Gardening is a big piece. It sounds like a small thing when I say it, but nurturing a garden, planning it, spending time in it, all shape how I live.
I became interested in the concept of a winter garden back when I lived in Wyoming and winters were so very bleak. The idea is to plan a garden with the entire season in mind. It’s easier to envision the spring flowers, the midsummer lushness, adding in the plants that bloom in the autumn, but thinking toward the largely leafless winter is a different kind of vision. What plants bring visual interest in their starker, hibernating states? What offers spots of color in a more monochromatic landscape?
Part of the trick is loving the winter garden for what it is, not trying to replicate the garden of warmer seasons.
I think this is a metaphor for a great deal in our lives, as gardens tend to be.
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//Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is “World Rules and Painting Yourself into a Corner: What’s a rule of your world established in a previous book that complicated things for you in a later book?”
This has happened to me SO MANY TIMES. Come on over for my most recent gaffe – and how I solved it!
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I put up my Halloween decorations yesterday – and brought in the hummingbird feeders at the same time. That felt like a symmetrical seasonal changeover, all happening in the due course of the seasons.
So, on Monday, in a fit of frustrated eye-rolling, I fired off this tweet:
Why are there so many classes offering to teach pantsers how to plot and story plan? They make me want to offer a class like “Pantsing for Plotters: Giving Up Control and Learning to Trust Your Creative Self.”
— Jeffe Kennedy (@jeffekennedy) October 21, 2019
To my vast surprise, this tweet has received SO MANY likes and responses. Clearly I wasn’t the only one feeling this frustration. Quite a few people wrote back about feeling the pressure to learn to pre-plot. I’ve felt it, too. There’s a strong opinion in the writing community – and maybe in the world at large – that outlining and pre-plotting is the best way to write. That it’s faster, more organized, requires less revision later.
The thing is: it’s just not true.
I mean, sure for some people, that process works. It’s certainly the one we’re taught in school (for the most part). But I was the student who hated trying to write an outline before I wrote the paper. I tried, but it was agonizing. Finally I figured out to just write the paper, then make an outline from it, and turn that in. If the teacher or professor had comments or tweaks (which almost never happened), I could add them in. Though those were the days before word processing, so I’d have to retype the paper. STILL, doing it that way was faster for me, and produced better work.
This is key: we must find what works for each of us individually and honor that process. Those people who insist that we not only CAN learn a “better” way, but *should* – and I can vouch that a few people popped into my timeline to say things like “No offense, but you have to learn this if you want to sell books” – are not being helpful. (Also, I really think that if you feel compelled to start a reply with “No offense, but…” or “Honestly…” then maybe you’re not engaging in a positive way.)
But “Pantsing” – derived from the phrase “fly by the seat of your pants,” and not my favorite descriptor by a long shot – is a way to access creative flow. I prefer to call it Writing for Discovery or Gardening. (I talked about this more on yesterday’s podcast, but for those who don’t listen, I’m reiterating a bit here.) For me, getting into the trance of writing opens up portals to other places, and the story flows in from there. “Gardening” is an analogy with a similar feel, where the beginning of the story is all planting seeds, the middle is nourishing the garden, and the ending is when it blossoms – and you discover what you’ve got.
Writing this way is absolutely an act of faith. It requires giving up conscious control of the story, which feels most uncomfortable to many people. It’s really the opposite of the academically taught methods, which focus on a cerebral approach. Sure, I get that many of my author friends access creative and subconscious flow in pre-plotting a story and writing the outline. Sadly, those conscious brain activities open no portals for me.
Several responders made the point that perhaps more pre-plotting and story-planning classes are taught because those methods *are* eminently more teachable. Which is a super valid point. In some ways, teaching someone to give up control and leap into the creative flow is nearly impossible. It’s so individual.
BUT, I think we can teach that this is an absolutely viable – and magical – way to access stories. We can make it clear that many, many authors who sell books (myself included) write this way. And we can talk about ways to open those portals, and how to keep them open. Also: not to panic.
So, I think I’m going to try this. I’m seeing about setting up a class. I’m also considering podcasting daily during NaNoWriMo with tips on pantsing your way through the month-long challenge. (There is, apparently, a podcast version called NaPodPoMo.) I’m also considering getting the author coaching set up and providing personalized support for writers during NaNoWriMo. If any of these ideas sound good to you, please let me know!