When Should You Stop Planning And Start Writing?

Me

So. That little bar in my sidebar has been stuck at 90% for a while. (With luck, by the time this post goes live, I’ll have begun actually writing the story. Not holding my breath.)

Why, you might be wondering, has it stagnated?

Have I been spending all my time watching tv shows and playing Borderlands 2 and reading books?

*cough*

No.

I mean, yes. But also no. Steven and I have been working on the worldbuilding and the planning (and a short story for a writing competition that I didn’t tell you guys about. Gosh, I suck at keeping y’all in the loop. *blush*) and we’ve been stuck in what Larry Brooks calls “The Search for Story”.

Larry Brooks

Larry Brooks has a great website (storyfix.com) and a great book on writing (Story Engineering) and another great book on writing coming out soon (Story Physics).

I recommend Story Engineering for anyone trying to get a handle on the basics of storytelling (not grammar, but key elements that build a successful story) and I’m pretty sure I’ll end up recommending Story Physics for people who understand everything in the Story Engineering book.

What I’ll talk about here, I learned from him and he freely offers a ton of fantastic advice on his blog. I recommend it.

/plug

Core Dramatic Question

One of the things Larry talks about rather a lot is making sure you know what your story is actually about.

He offers a lot of tools that help you go from the BAD “this is what my story is about” …

A woman who can speak to living plants.

… to a GOOD “this is what my story is about”

One of the king’s undergardeners, a young woman gifted with plantspeech, overhears rumors of a plot to overthrow the king and poison half the city’s citizens. Her warnings ignored, she and her plant friends must find a way to stop the disaster even when she herself becomes a target.

The difference is more than just the level of detail. It’s in what that detail says about the story.

“What is this story about?” can be answered in too many ways.

An Exercise

Take your current Work in Progress and answer the question “what is this story about?”

Take your answer and rephrase it as a question — the core dramatic question that the reader will be asking themselves as they read the story.

In our plant example, the rephrasing might be :

Will the undergardener be able to use her plantspeech to save a king a stop a plague despite the fact that nobody will believe her, before the villain’s henchmen manage to kill her?

Okay, not my best work, but you get the idea.

This is the Core Dramatic Question.

We need to set this question up in the reader’s mind early in the book, then spend the entire book working towards the answer.

Yes, the story features a girl with plantspeech, but the STORY is ABOUT this plague and whether or not she’ll be able to stop it in time. We’ve got stakes, we’ve got conflict, we’ve got antagonists …

And yes, the fact that she flirts with apple trees is a good hook, but it’s not enough to build an entire story around.

When Do You Start Writing?

Start writing when you can build an effective Core Dramatic Question. Until then, you don’t actually know what your STORY is about, even if you know the hook and some details and characters.

You need all those things to write a story, but we’re not character portrait artists.

We’re storytellers.

What story are you telling?

 

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Larry the Coffee Fairy
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Writing is Not Magic