Full disclosure, my wife and I had dinner with Warren and his wife, Marge, in Arizona while we were at the Poisoned Pen Press/SoHo Press Mystery conference last September. They’re delightful people and Warren is an outstanding writer.
His blog made me evaluate what kind of writer I am…a planner or someone who flies by the seat of his pants. I think I’m a little of both.
When I start a book, I try to write a slam-bang, grab em’ by the throat first chapter. I don’t have a clue what the book will be about or who the bad guy is. I will work on that first chapter over and over and over. In my newest book, Graveyard Bay, I wrote the first chapter easily fifty times until I found what I was looking for.Graveyard Bay was my biggest challenge so far. My second Geneva Chase mystery, Darkness Lane, ended on a bit of a cliffhanger. Geneva’s been entrusted with a notebook that incriminates nefarious Russian mobsters. The third book had to be a complicated chess game on how that notebook both helps her and puts her in terrifying danger.
Another disclosure, the ARCs for Graveyard Bay are out. This is the part that makes me really nervous. That means the book is out for review. Fingers crossed. Oh, and the book launches September 10.
Once the first chapter is done, I move on to the second chapter, and then the one after that.
At some point, however, I have to write down the characters and what I think they’re up to. There are blind alleys, twists, turns, plot threads that will have to be accounted for.
But even at that, the book is a journey for me. As such, some of the plot twists and character dialogue is unexpected. I like that writing a novel is as much an adventure for me as I hope it will be when someone reads it.
In his book On Writing, Stephen King argues that he can tell whether or not a book was written using an outline. He thinks such books feel somehow "staler" than books that are written the "true way," which is by the seat of your pants, never knowing what will happen next.
William Blundell in his book The Art and Craft of Feature Writing, he said, “I’m a strong opponent of outlining. It’s deciding in advance what the story will be, and then just bolting the whole thing together like something out of a hardware store.”
Ray Bradbury said, “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.”
So, as I await the September launch of Graveyard Bay and I prepare for Thrillerfest in just a couple of weeks, I’ve gotten the green light by my editor to continue working on Shadow Hill after she’s looked over the first hundred pages.
I’m twelve chapters along and, yes, I’m already taking notes of the untied threads I’ve left and blind alleys that Geneva is going to have to explore before I figure out who the heck the bad guy or gal might be. www.thomaskiesauthor.com
Thanks, Thomas, for this contribution to the never-ending discussion about the advantages/disadvantages of these methods.
ReplyDeleteInteresting: Of the three people you quote at the end, the two who lean toward pantsing are accomplished fiction writers; the one who recommends outlining is a feature writer. Two different animals, two distinct goals, two methods. Of course a nonfiction piece requires a solid awareness of structure in advance -- more than is necessarily required by fiction.