My writing process, part 2.

In the previous post I explained how I do canon research before I start writing a story; so now it's time to talk about the second step, which is drafting the plot of the story.

As I said, it all starts with an idea, but in order to write the idea well, it is important to have a plot ready. The plot is the skeleton that supports the actual story, and it is here where you can go crazy and include all the options that you could think of. It's the thinking heavy part of the process, I believe.

The first thing I do when I'm preparing a draft is to determine the goal and write it down as short as possible, three lines maximum. This helps me keep the central idea front and center. I'll use my Ranma 1/2 story A Nabiki mystery to illustrate this point.

When I first came up with the idea, the goal was clear and easy to summarize, if I remember correctly it was something like this:

"Nabiki solves a mystery that begins in the Kuno mansion, Kasumi helps her a little."

It's very simple and it can be expanded (or not) as needed, it also determines quite well what the story is going to be about and it gives the frame to work in properly.

Once I had the goal set, I did the first draft, which focused on the mystery itself and how the results affected the characters. This ended up being too long and tedious, and I thought it would not fit the tone of the series well, so I rewrote the draft again and it took a more silly approach to the central conflict. I remember that was better, but it would have been too description heavy and perhaps not funny enough. So I reworked it a third time, in that one the central conflict changed and ended up being worse than the previous one, so I went back to the second and worked on the problem I had with it, which was it relied heavily on description; a few tweaks later, I was able to shift the narrative so that it would be dialogue based, something I thought then would help keep the funny and light-hearted aspect of the story I wanted to convey.

Alright, to make this short, this is what I do when drafting a plot:

1. Identify the goal and write it clearly in no more than three sentences.
2. Write the events in the draft, don't fear moving them around.
3. If the draft strays from the original goal, revise and determine if it's worth it or not.
4. If the draft sticks to the goal, but it ends up being something difficult to narrate, revise.
5. Revise, revise, revise until you think the draft is good enough to work with.

As you can see, the most important aspect here is to lose your fear of revising a draft. It took me a while to lose this fear, but I eventually learned that this is what the draft is for, it's the place to throw and move ideas around, and where you can go wild with them; it is here where I can prepare the contents and the foundation and the advantage is that I don't have to worry about it being terrible, because I am the only one who will ever see this very early rough outline.

Next time we'll talk about the third step: The story draft.