Story Story Writing. Pre-Planned or Improvised ?

[Midboss]

Good day. I recently got thinking on the subject of writing and more specifically, the degree of planning that one can put into it. This goes just as much for written stories, movies, games, DMing... One could say there are two schools of thought on that matter:


I) The first is simply to wing it and make it up as you go along.


Pros: Favors creativity, gives the opportunity of going ways you hadn't even thought of.


Cons: Risks of writing oneself in corner, dangling plot threats, possible internal inconsistency


2) The second is to plan everything and decide in advance where you want to go.


Pros: Favors internal consistency, groundwork can make writing easier


Cons: More rigid, requires more work in the early stages


Those are the two basics and obviously, most people fit somewhere in between.


Personally, having the mind of an engineer, I tend to favor the second. Whenever writing a story, I always have other documents first created listing characters, locations, plot-points... as well as a wanted chronology. That way, when the actual writing begins, I don't get lost.


I also have a unique writing style. Rather than doing it chapter by chapter like most would do, I instead do a technique that I refer to as the Bones-Meat-Skin method. This is where I first write the story in its bare bones, basically worrying more about the overall plot than every scene and detail. Once this is done, I know what I'm aiming for and performed the necessary plot adjustments in my head. Then, I go with the meat, working on adding specific scenes not necessarily essential to the main plot but that add characterization and atmosphere. Finally, once this is done, I put in the details, refine the writing style, the descriptions and so fourth so that the story is readable by an actual human being.


This is how I do it and I'd now like to know what others do in this subject, what are their opinions, experiences and so fourth.

 

[MDL]

-Moved to Creativity-


I have been writing on and off for about four years, but I have never actually been the storyteller of a roleplay before 2020 was started on this site maybe six months ago. What I had to slowly learn was the importance of finding a balance between planning ahead and considering the possibilities, the unexpected and actually allowing the players to affect the story in as grand scale as myself. Finding a balance in planning and "winging it" is difficult, but very rewarding (Not implying I've found it yet, gosh no).


When writing prose I think if you can plan ahead, if you're not the kind of writer which needs to write to write. Basically someone which imagination runs crazy only once they're actually writing. You should plan as much as possible ahead.


I think the writing style you're telling me about here is interesting, but I would like to know what you mean when you say that you first "write" the story and then "write" the story. In the first step, how and what do you write then? Is is a storyboard, scene orders, a mindmap?

 

[Midboss]

The first phase is basically I write the story essential scenes without bothering too much with the details. Gets the plot going and enables me to gather a momentum when writing.


Phase 2 is more the I expand on the scenes and add scenes that aren't immediately plot essential.

 

[Ignitedstar]

Degree of planning, huh... I'm... kinda random. Diligent, but random.


Like my RP: The Inn Between. I didn't really know what I wanted out of it, at first. It has a great premise... then the rest just kinda didn't work out. Then I put the idea down for about two or three months before coming back to it. A few weeks before I started the roleplay back up again, I had a eureka moment thinking, "Wow, this idea is perfect. I know exactly what I want to do, now!" And... it's going from there.


I wrote this as a writing exercise. No prior planning involved, whatsoever. I came up with the plot as I was writing it. I knew from the moment I started that I wanted a story about a Dragon God talking to a blade of grass. I also wanted it to sound like a children's story.


There's also Erathem. I have so many different versions of this that it's a bit sad (last time I counted: 7). Thing is... When I was younger, I could never get the idea to work, so I always added things that I thought would work, then removed other things later deciding that I didn't want them. I wanted to find a happy medium for how realistic I could get while still involving Anthros. I've working on it on and off for a long, long time. I think... five years? Or something. One of my first steps was finding an alternative word that they would call themselves since it wouldn't make any sense to call them Furries or Anthros. I'm happy with what I have right now-- it's actually what I planned my comic book on.


I guess that's winging it, huh? >_>


I'm totally wingin' the "Not So Fast, Inaba! Holiday Hussle" special. I have almost nothing planned prior. The plot moves on when I'm in GIMP making each scene.

 

[ehmygirl]

Writing for me usually starts off with something that's been percolating in my head. I wonder how it might look written so I start to type. One I have the basics down then I decide if I like it. Usually it goes into a folder where I save it and go back and look at it from time to time, write a few more pages and leave it.


I had written a nice little story that got lost when my computer died and I have not had the desire to really rewrite it because what I had written was really good (though it did need some work). I might, now that I have a writing partner, look at it again, and expand on it. For that I had started off with an idea. Well, it was originally going to be a submission for a scholarship but it got too big and took too long. Once I started writing it I realized I needed to have a reason why these things were happening and so I came up with reasons, trying to make it realistic in the setting in which I had placed it.


It needed work in some places but, I think, overall it worked.


With the book Child of Chaos, I had just written a page and I sent it to Cap and said, what do you think, wanna write this with me? So we got to talking about it and we wrote and wrote and we discussed it more and more. We'd have entire sessions where we did nothing but discuss what was going on in the story and why Orran was like he was, how it is Callie got into the position she did. We got about halfway through it when we realized we needed to figure out where they were in the country, what time of year it was. We made no reference to the seasons so it was very absent in some important detail. We didn't even have them reacting to the cold/heat/whatever. And so we needed to change that. And we reazlied also we needed to figure out where this was going.


So we wrote down a timeline, we went back into the story, figured out when we wanted the book to kick off and then we drew a map, figured out mileage (yes, yes we did) and how long it would take them to get from point A to point B and we'd adjust it accordingly. Then we sat and discussed what we wanted to see happen in the other two books. So, eventually we created an idea of what each chapter needed to do and we went from there. I wrote chapter 12, realized it was too long and created a chapter 13, then I realized we needed more information between 11 & 12 so a new chapter 11 was created. I hate to say the writing was organic because I hate that term, but that's pretty much how the writing for us in the first book was.


With the second, we're starting out with a calendar, with a map, we even had days of the week and we have, while discussing plans for an RP based off this world (though not the characters in this book), figured out other nations, peoples, cultures and what not in this world. We're starting with a timeline, we know when each person is starting, and then, once we know the important dates that things happen by (for in the first two chapters this is fairly important), we can let it flow as it will. And we'll probably do this for the rest of the book. We have a fairly tight time frame in which we want to get everything done, so we need to make sure that we're not taking 6 months to do something when everything's going to come to a head in a few months' time. We are structuring it very carefully but before we start to organize what's going to happen in each chapter we talk about it. We ask why, why are they doing this, why are they going there, how are they going to get in there, why is s/he needed, how is this going to advance the plot. So we have a good reason and a good idea why something's going on.


And once we have something written, we go back and read it, send it off to my sister, get her suggestions, tell her why she doesn't need to know the Rites of Eliest because Mildan doesn't give a flying rat's ass what they are. And continuity, we always check for that. Eliest is Spring, but I think we made Serena spring in the last book so we need to go back and fix that, Serena is Fall. And yes, we've discussed why each goddess represents a certain season. We have a reason why Eliest is Spring and her sister is Fall and not the other way around.

 

[Tabby]

I plan writing ahead far in advance, but not so much the entire framework as major scenes and themes I want to explore, and I flesh that out with more ideas as I actually GET to that stuff. It's sort of a combination of careful planning and flagrantly WINGING IT, but I make great efforts to stick to a consistent internal framework and drop occasional hints within the writing to give the illusion that it's all planned out; sort of true, sort of not. For example, I may figure out the behind-the-elements of the world and decide the general themes and a number of major scenes that portray the character's journey, then add the stuff in between as it happens and/or as I get more ideas to fill the gap. Sometimes that goes as far as adding to/refining already-planned scenes/universal constants, but generally those are already decided by the themes I want to explore, so it's more the exact details than overarching arcs that get changed.


If I'm working out an entire setting or standalone setting+story , I also tend to work out many of the setting-relevant major characters while leaving a framework for adding more as appropriate. For example, if I was doing something similar to the Greek pantheon, I might work out the king of the gods, his wife, and some of the "bigger" gods, say Athena and Ares, and then leave room for Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Poseidon... etc etc. When I get more ideas for them, or if I just got inspiration for "what if there was a god of like, oceans and shit?" I work them out and add them to the pantheon as organically as possible. Kinda depends on the setting as to how well that actually works - I write a lot of original fiction with so much stuff going on behind-the-scenes and highly limited human knowledge that it's not really all that out of place for a new character to pop out of nowhere, given that it's a multiverse with (usually) minimal contact between the worlds.


The more I can make it seem planned, and more importantly never contradict myself, the better. Don't want to break immersion and all that, right?

 

[Wolf Rawrrr]

"There is only one true way to tell a story. And that's from the beginning."


This philosophy of mine was meant for the big picture. Whole worlds on a large scale. Stuff you read in books such as The Lord of the Rings, other fantasy works, or anything similar. However, it probably applies to small-time projects as well. Just not in identical aspects. It's up to the writer, in the end.


An interesting story starts in medias res - in the middle of things. It develops, suddenly twists and does a whole lot of crazy stuff that make it obvious that the same story would be impossible to write if it was written like that. But in truth, the entire story has already been told, from the beginning to the end. It's just that the reader is being given a small part of it, then another part, and another, and most of the time some parts in between are skipped. Then there's stuff that links them together, the chains of storyline.


I'm not saying you have to go and create a complete story. But you have to create all the important stuff - A brief story for yourself on how it began, which actions led to what happened next, who was responsible, how it ended - and all the stuff in between that matters. A very good analogy to explain this would be a movie and a movie trailer.


The movie is what you created as a writer. The trailer is what your readers/players get. A mixed up series of events. They don't get the whole story. They have to go through it in the general order you imagined and discover everything for themselves. But remember - you can't make the trailer if you didn't make the movie first.


Trying to write a story without a sufficient degree of background planning is like trying to make the trailer for a movie that doesn't exist, and then having to create the movie based on that trailer.


True stories are made from the beginning. But they're told in every other way.

 

[ehmygirl]

Truly. And there's also the little details that the reader never sees either. In order to flesh out a story, to give it some real meat, there should be a lot of backstory, details that you, the writer, know about, are important to have, but not necessarily important for the reader to know. And that way, if you find that you need to explain why it is X has been done such Y fashion, you have that information.


I mean, we have the days of the week, and I don't think that's going to come into the story. But, it's entirely possible and, if it comes up, we've got that information. And because we're keeping track of the dates, we'll know on which day of the week Z occurs.

 

[Grey]

My stories are normally born fully-formed. When it comes to my personal work, anyway. The overall plot materializes in my head, and then I start writing. I suppose that doesn't count so much with Brief Lives, though. The exception is Nights Neverending, which I want to finish so I can know the ending as much anyone else. Gods In The Machine is in a similar camp - I'm only half-sure of where that one is going.


I sort of planned Child Soldiers, but that was more because I wasn't in a position to write during its early gestation so I plotted the structure out in my head - but that may, when I have the resources, take on a House of Leaves style meta-textual twist which will need meticulous planning.


My games are different. Writing a commercial RPG needs a plan, and it'll get refined and expanded upon every step of the way.


The games I ST have their setting as plan, because I hate railroading or making a game into a story I'm telling.