From Tabletop to Paperback: Prolegamena Part 1

Welcome back to From Tabletop to Paperback! Hopefully the first few posts showed you how the things you already do well as a gamer can serve you in your transition to writing fiction. I snuck a lot of good advice in there about Character, Setting, and Plot that you'll need to keep in mind as we roll forward. But now that you believe you can do the work, it's time for me to show you how to do the work.

  Pre-Writing aka the Writing You MUST Do Before You Write

You know when you were a kid and your mom stuck you with dish washing duty? And that was bad enough, right? But then she made you rinse the dishes first. And, seriously, she'd stand there and tap her toe to make sure that you rinsed them properly. Then you'd say something like, "Why am I washing the dishes before the dishwasher WASHES THE DISHES?!" Then your mom would say, "That's it, young man, you just bought yourself dish duty for the month." You'd bluster and declare your innocence while your dad just shook his head as if to say, "You'll learn one day, son."

Pre-Writing is exactly like that only you play the part of yourself and your Mom. And if you don't do it, Future You is playing the part of your Dad.

Novels are long*. They also take you a long time to write**. You also don't write them all in one go***. In between bouts of writing, you're likely to sleep, go to work, run a million errands, plan a birthday party, listen to music, watch TV and movies, read other novels, talk to myriad other human beings, have spiritual epiphanies...you get the idea.

Any one of these things could easily cause you to forget what you were writing. The fact that you could do all of them in between rounds of writing means you're going to spend a lot more time remembering what you were writing than you will actually writing.

Unless you do your map it out with Pre-Writing.

Mapping It All Out

I'm terrible at road trips. All I want to do is get from where I am to where I want to go as fast as possible. The intervening distance is an obstacle for me to overcome so I can enjoy the destination. The world invented the interstate for me.

The idea of meandering around looking at alligator farms and giant balls of twine and places that presidents allegedly slept sounds torturous****. It's a bunch of pointless hours in the car -- or, God forbid, the bus -- with people you swear you liked before your tenth hour of listening to road noise and their "travellin' mix" while looking at crap, oddities, and nonsense.

And writing your story will be exactly like this if you don't finish your Pre-Writing. You have to create character descriptions (choose your traveling companions), you must ask yourself a Story Question (Plot your destination), you have to craft a scene list (map your route), you have to plan for sequels to regroup after some of your scenes (where are the gas stations and bathrooms?). You might even want to have a writing coach standing by (GPS).

I didn't even mention clearing all this with your family (checking weather reports) or the backstory you write as a Prologue and then inevitably cut because nobody cares but you (packing clothes and toiletries). You have a lot of work to do before you get in the car.

Meandering about on vacation might be somebody's idea of a good time, but we've established that writing (if you want to do it well) is work. And I'm sure there have been and still are successful novelists who just start writing to see where the story takes them. But for every one of them, there are likely dozens, hundreds, thousands of unfinished novels stranded on the side of the road for lack of gas and a spare tire.

The Bare Minimum

I could probably write whole books on each one of these, but below you'll find the bare minimum Pre-Writing I believe you have to do, along with a brief description of what it is and why it's important.

Story Question: Remember, this is the crux of the book. This is the question to which the reader is reading to find the answer. Without this, you probably don't have a story.
Character List: Remember how we talked about the thousands of words you'd probably have to write in order for your main character(s), your antagonist(s), and your secondary character(s) to read like actual human beings with thoughts, wants, and desires? Yeah, that goes here.
Scene List: What's going to happen that drives your Characters toward answering the Story Question? Or what steps will they take to answer it? How does each step lead naturally to the next, and when do you need to take a sec to recap and make sure the reader is following?
The Climax: Sure, you know the answer to your Story Question, but how do you answer it?
The Resolution: What is the emotional impact you expect the Climax to have on your readers? Happiness? Depression? Smug satisfaction at a well-deserved comeuppance? Explain it in 3-5 sentences so you know what you're aiming for from the first words of your story.

Each of those items covers several sub-items, and I could go into painful detail on each of them. But if I did, that would be my process, not The Process. When it comes to Pre-Writing, there are always different strokes for different folks. Remember how I never fill out my character descriptions? Well, all the time I save there I wind up sinking into my Story Question.

You may have the same issue or a radically different one. That's the kind of thing you learn the more you write, and it's why I said I could go for a book on each one of those items. And maybe even a book on each of my sub items.

That's why this is the bare minimum. You have the essentials of your trip planned out when you've finished these. It doesn't mean you won't take a wrong turn or run out of gas along the way, but it does make those things a lot less likely.

Mastering the Game

Most of the time, I'm the GM for whatever group I play with. I've done various amounts of game prep ranging from full notebooks all the way down to three bullet points on a napkin. I've run games with rules you could fit on a single sheet up to systems with multiple compendia. I know a thing or two about game night preparation.

I can apply a lot of that wisdom to Pre-Writing, and I'll show you how next time. It's a worthwhile comparison because, as every GM knows, all that prep will never survive a run in with Player Characters unscathed. The same goes for your Pre-Writing and your story's characters, but if you're ready for that, then it isn't nearly as worrisome or scary.

See you next time for Prolegamena Part 2: Lonely Fun and the Pre-Writing Package.

*Well, at least 50,000 words. Which gets less long with every novel you write. Of course, you're going to write longer and longer novels, so my point stands.

**Well, NaNoWriMo will help you get that time down to a month, but that's still long in work-hours if nothing else.

***I'm sure somebody somewhere does, but they are a Mayor McCrazy of Crazytown.

****Remember, this is as long as I have a destination. I've actually dreamed for a while about a trip that is all about the trip and what you see on it rather than about going somewhere.