Plotting Could Kill Your First Book
By: Richard K Fox
Tags: Writing Tips, Creativity, Writing, Productivity

Plotting Could Kill Your First Book

How to keep writing exciting

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Writing your first novel is challenging, but it doesn’t have to be. I’ve written at least fifteen full-length novels in the past ten years and published five of them in the past seven months. At first, it was tough. Like back-breaking, time-sucking, soul-crushing tough. Some days the words came easily, and other days they were a struggle.

It doesn’t have to be tough. Writing a novel, even your first one, can be a liberating and enjoyable experience. There could be one thing getting in your way.

Plotting.

I know what you’re thinking. How am I supposed to write the next great novel if I don’t have a solid plot? I hate to be the voice of reason in a room of dreamers, but your first book will probably not be great. It will probably be something you write and then hide. Like at the back of the closet or in the attic. It might suck.

The important thing is not to focus on how great or how bad the novel is. The important thing is finishing the first draft. To do that, we need to remove all the things getting in our way. Like a strict plot and unrealistic expectations.

In my opinion, unrealistic expectations and over planning are the two biggest things holding you back from finishing a novel.

How did I figure this out?

It all started roughly 11 years ago in November. If you are a writer, you can already guess the next line. It was my first NaNoWriMo. If you’re not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s that special time of year when aspiring authors spend all of their free time and sanity finishing a fifty thousand word novel in November.

I signed up with a group of friends thinking it would be fun. We scheduled weekly times to meet, found bars and cafes for our gatherings, and set up our own little writing group. The problem was, I had no idea what I wanted to write.

I have always been an avid reader, but I was new to writing. So, I talked to the friend who suggested I participate. She told me to try plotting a story. It’s a little embarrassing now to think about, but I didn’t know what plotting was. At that point in my life, I was not a writer. In fact, the last writing class I had was in college. It was an argumentative writing class. We did some basic outlines, but there was no plotting involved.

I ran down to my local bookstore and bought the first book I could find on plotting. I read it over a few days and went through the exercises. By the end of the week I had a plot. Problem solved.

Or so I thought.

I remember the first writing event. It was at a small cafe near my apartment in Seattle. I vividly remember starting my first novel with the plotting notebook next to my laptop. I remember opening the notebook and reading what I was supposed to write in the first chapter. I remember the excitement of the story I had created. I also remember the complete disappointment when I wrote. It felt stale. It was a slog. It was definitely not fun.

Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash

Did I give up?

No, I finished NaNoWriMo and won my printable certificate declaring me a winner! I didn’t actually finish the story, but I wrote fifty thousand words. That was what was required to win.

Unfortunately, it was complete crap. It was terrible. I tried to read it a few months later and got about two chapters in before stopping and deleting the entire thing.

Most sane people would take that experience and decide writing wasn’t for them. I’m apparently not sane. I followed the one consistent piece of advice I heard from writers. To be a writer, you need to write every day.

I started writing immediately. I wrote about the people on my bus ride home from work. The weird guy who thought it was all right to trim his toenails on the bus was a rather memorable subject. I wrote letters to friends I met during my travels around the world. I wrote about things I wished I could do. Some of it was fiction, and some of it was not. I wrote about whatever came to mind. I wrote, on average, one thousand words a day.

I made it a habit.

I also looked back at my first NaNoWriMo experience and analyzed why it was so terrible. I enjoyed the writing events I went to and the people I met. I enjoyed the plotting experience, but when it came to writing the novel, it was painful.

Then the most obvious thing happened. I compared that experience to my daily writing habit. Guess what I wasn’t doing.

Wow, you’re good at this.

Yes, you are correct. I wasn’t plotting.

Writing from an outline was a terrible experience for me. It felt like I was tracing rather than drawing. It was no longer creative. It was the opposite. When I wrote without plotting, it was exciting. It was a daily adventure.

Sometimes you need to test your beliefs

Fast forward 11 years, and I write about four thousand words a day. I write novels and short stories, and have an email list full of people that seems to like what I put out. One thing hasn’t changed. I still don’t plot.

I’m not a financially successful author. I only make a portion of my income from writing fiction, but that amount goes up most months. I’m working on it. I’m always looking for ways to improve, and about a year ago I was told by an army of authors that the only way to become successful was to plot your stories. They said it was more efficient and made the novels faster to produce. I figured I should try it.

I’m not sure why I tried it. Maybe I forgot about my original plotting experience. Perhaps I thought it would be different. I was a better writer after all. Mostly it was me believing the idea that volume of work is vital if you want to be a successful independent author.

Fun fact, it isn’t.

So, I planned out the second book in my recent series. I created new characters like I always did. I created the villains and picked a few locations to use in the book and did my research. Then I started plotting. At first, I just wrote a big summary of what I thought the story should be about. Then I broke it into chapters that fit the structure and story beats I wanted to hit.

When I finished, I had a complete story in my mind and on paper that I could follow. I started writing the next day. I hit chapter one hard, and I immediately regretted it. My ordinary four thousand words per day plummeted to around one thousand. After a few days, I was able to get the word count up to approximately two thousand.

My goal for that book was to complete the first draft in a month and then start the editing and revision process. It took me nearly six weeks to get the first draft done. That might sound fast to you, but I can usually get the first draft of a sixty to eighty thousand word novel done in around four weeks. It killed my productivity.

After I finished the first draft I did what I normally do. I let it rest for a day and then started revising. Not only was the book harder to write, it was harder to read. It didn’t flow. I write fast-paced action in either the thriller or fantasy genre. The story I wrote was not fast-paced. Something was missing.

The adventure was missing. Not the adventure in the story. That was still there buried under a plethora of unnecessary words that I would usually not include. The adventure I had while writing was missing.

When I write, I tell myself a story. It’s a story entirely for me. I write what I want to read. I don’t know the ending, and I don’t know what will happen on the next page.

My fingers race across the keyboard to get to the next action sequence or the next big reveal. As I’m writing, I want to find out where the story is going. I’m writing into the dark, a phrase I first heard in the book Writing Into The Dark by Dean Wesley Smith. If you are familiar with NaNoWriMo, you would call it pantsing.

There are drawbacks to this style of writing. The first is the first draft might be a lot rougher than you prefer. It might require a lot more editing than something created after plotting. That is not my experience, but that’s something I hear from many who write into the dark. Dean Wesley Smith suggests certain practices that help with this, but that is not the point of this article. Completing your first novel is the point.

So, if you’re having trouble finishing your first novel, try throwing away the plot you developed. You probably have characters you love. People that live inside your head that you can’t wait to see. Well, grab those characters and throw them into a situation. Get comfortable in your regular writing spot, and just tell yourself a story.