Reading and Writing #2: Plotting

About a month ago, I wrote a blog post about my experience as a reader and a writer and how I've been trying to juggle the two. You can read it HERE.

The Lovely Shirley Marr made a comment suggesting she'd like to read a post about how I went about my plotting out the story I am currently writing. I thought that would make a good topic for another 'Reading and Writing' post.

I'll start by explaining things I have heard other writers tell me before I go into my (very) amateur method.

I'm a bit of a junkie for author events. Basically anything I can find out about (and actually have the time to attend) I'll go to. I go events for authors when I've never read any of their books. I go to events that are designed for primary school aged children to meet an author. I'll go to anything. Basically, I'm like a sponge, and I'm willing to soak up any information at all that might help me on my journey to become a real, proper and true, "Author" myself one day.

So, that said: Plotting.

Emily Rodda has always been one of my favourite authors. I mean, I grew up reading her books. Literally and figuratively. I was obsessed with Teen Power Inc in primary school (still am - I nearly have a complete set!) and then I got to read Deltora Quest and Rondo, and most recently the Three Doors! (I Love that I'm still reading new releases from someone I loved 20 years ago). And if there's one thing that Emily Rodda can achieve, it's the twist at the end. She is genius at getting you to really believe something, wholeheartedly before telling you, actually, you're wrong, this is how it is, and see all these clues I gave you that you misinterpreted. Gold.

Anyway - At an event where she was talking to 10 year olds (and I was hiding up the back pretending not to be a groupie-fan-boy), one of them asked the question I most wanted the answer to: "How do you get your twists to work at the end?"

She said, she will always know EXACTLY how the book will end before she does anything else. Sometimes even before she knows where she's starting. Then she fills it in in the middle, and she can add twists and turns as she sees fit. This was interesting, because I had heard other writers say they start a book and see where it will go. So there's one tip you could use... Know your ending!

Then, when I heard Garth Nix talk (admittedly, this was to a group of grown-up-groupie-fan-boys-and-girls) He said he will always write out an entire chapter by chapter outline of any book he is going to write - he just never looks at it again. I guess, in this case, if you have got it in your head where you want to go, you can let the writing process open up other possibilities.

What about you? I hear Shirley ask.

Well, I've tried to employ both of these, in some ways. I'm a real list freak. I write them all the time. And excel geek too. Sometimes my partner will come into our study and say "another spreadsheet? what's this one for." or "You'll need to make a list of all your lists" etc. I love that fluff... I can't help it.

So when asked the first question, I said: I'm plotting out my story! And, indeed, I was. My novel has alternating chapters from two different characters' perspectives. I made a spreadsheet that had 3 columns: Chapter / Elsie / Angus. I arbitrarily picked a number of chapters (24 sounded good) and put numbers in the first column. Then I greyed out alternating cells in a checkerboard type way so show when that character will not be narrating at that point. Then I wrote in what happened in chapter 1 because I'd already written that one. Then, borrowing Emily's idea, I put my twist in towards the end, and then worked backwards. Being in excel, I found it easy to move things around if one character's discoveries didn't time well with the others. I've got it to a point where I'm happy with it, but haven't been too prescriptive. I can't guarantee I won't look at it again, like Garth, but I'm ready to start writing the book proper now.

This is just what I did for this current book. I've done different things in the past, but as this post has gone on so much longer than I intended, I'm going to stop there. I was going to talk about how my reading helps my plotting and how I plot my reading to help my writing, but we can save that for another time.

I hope that wasn't too boring and feel free to ask questions to inspire further 'Reading and Writing' posts.