How Do You Cook?
What kind of cook are you? Do you follow a recipe to the letter, leveling off your measuring spoon to make sure you have precisely the right amount of each ingredient? Or do you wing it — you know what the end product should be like so you add a bit of this, a splash of that and it turns out however it turns out, sometimes right, sometimes not, but always good?
What about when you write? Do you plot out your book, develop your characters, create your recipe, so to speak, and then follow it to the letter? Or do you fly by the seat of your pants, just sitting down with a general idea of what you want your story to be about and just write it?
Of course, there is no right or wrong way to cook or to write. You can end up with as delicious a dish by following a recipe or by making it up as you go. Of course, you don't have to follow one way entirely, you can be a blending of the two.
That's me. I blend. When I want to cook something, I'll look up three of four recipes for the same thing (I LOVE the internet for this — years ago I used to skim through four or five cookbooks looking for recipes) and then make an amalgamation of them all picking out the parts that sound the best or most logical to me, and then I'll add a dash more of this and maybe a little less of that to get the taste I'm looking for.
When I write, I'll carefully plot out my book, spending a few weeks creating my characters and plotting out their arcs. Then I'll sit down and write and what comes out, comes out. Yes, I'll refer back to my recipe, my carefully plotting out story structure, every few days to make sure I'm on the right track, but for the most part I engage in method writing (another blog to come, promise!) and what happens, happens. I will go back when I edit to make sure I've got enough conflict in there, and I'll beef up my descriptions — adding a little more of this, taking away a little of that. And at the end of the book, I've got a very close approximation of my original plot, even though it's not exact.
So, how do you plot? Or don't you?
Over the next few weeks, off and on, I'm going to be posting summaries of the chapters in my new writing book, Chapter One. In it, I talk about all the different aspects of writing — yes, it's a beginning writing book, but you may find my take on things a little different from yours. In my book, and on this blog, I will also include a number of worksheets with which I plot out my books. If you're a plotter, you'll love them! If you're a pantser, you might want to look them over to know what you want to keep in mind as you're writing or editing. So look out for these blogs, and you can always find the entire book on Amazon, Nook and Smashwords (Kobo, iBooks, etc, through Smashwords' premium catalogue). And just to be different, it's not only available as an ebook, but POD as well, if you need it (as many of my writing students do) in your hand so you can flip back and forth through it — something not easy to do with an ebook.
Happy cooking!
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