Question for my writers.
When you're writing your novels, lore, screenplay, fanfics, whatever it may be.. Do you plan out the whole story before you start?
if so, do you stick to it 100% or let it be a VERY loose guideline?
11 Comments
I've only written one story for Riot, but there were a few phases to it. Note - I was SUPER new to the process, so there was a misstep I made and quite a lot of hand holding on the part of the editing team, who were great.
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Coming up with a bunch of pitches. First thing was coming up with several pitches with 4-7 beats bullet-pointed out.
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Identifying pillars. (This should be numbered zero, instead of two!) At this point, I had several pitches, with beats, but I was having trouble identifying which ones were better than others. Another Rioter writer offered to talk me through the problem, and said that something that helped him was to work out what the pillars of the story were - what I was trying to achieve. There might be a couple of these, but until you've worked this out, you're really just wasting your own time!
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Narrow down to three pitches. Now that I could measure the goodness of the many pitches, I could identify which best fulfilled the pillars (and/or come up with some new ones). Then I sent those three to the stakeholders (and told my editor which one I felt was strongest) to see if they agreed they were headed in the right direction, and what one (if any) to move forward with. In my case, the one I felt was strongest was picked.
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Write a first draft. The editor had given me a deadline for a first draft (I requested that it be as soon as possible, so we could iterate more frequently) and a word count range. I spent a day stumbling over the start of the story before kicking myself into just finishing the first draft, crap beginning and all. That helped a lot. So over the course of a couple of days, I got that first draft written, hitting all of the beats from the bullet point list in the pitch.
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Cut. At this point, I had written twice as many words as was the maximum allowed for the piece. Doh! Before I even let my editor take a look, I spent the last day or two before my first deadline, just cutting like a mad-woman. Whole paragraphs of setup and description - gone. In the style of Stephen King, I went on an adjective massacre. Even still, it was over 200 words over the maximum limit by the time my first draft deadline hit.
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Submit first draft. Sent it off to the editor, and I gave him a few days to take a look over it. (This took a bit longer than might normally happen, but real life was going down, and couldn't be helped.)
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Fix problems for second draft. A few days after that, I got a version back that, honestly, was more yellow-highlight-for-editing than it was untouched. Basically, I had too many character points of view, and for the length of the piece, that was overkill. So I rewrote about 80% of the story to have it be only from one character's perspective. Managed to trim down a few words while I was at it, but STILL over the limit. Fixed a few other issues, some suggested changes - but at this point, every beat in the pitch is still being hit. Very little deviation from that initial outline.
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Submit 2nd draft for SME feedback. At this point, time was pretty short, and the state of the story was considered in a finished enough state, to submit to the rest of the process. It was sent off to various SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) for blind feedback, so that if there were any problems or contradictions or cross-product issues, they could be identified. They keep this blind so the writer doesn't get inundated with possibly contradictory, wildly irregular, feedback - it goes via the editor.
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Fixes and copy editing. Working with my editor (in a Google doc, live editing a shared file) we picked apart any last sentences or paragraphs that needed a fix up, with the SME feedback. Here, there was one or two, but generally it was more correcting the order of a sentence or so, rather than anything content wise. We get this done in an hour or two - working remote because in this case, we're in different offices.
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Copy editing. I say goodbye to my story, and leave it in the capable hands of the editing team. Life happens, again, so the copy editing doesn't go down until the last minute - I get 'accosted' once or twice by a manic looking editor asking for my feels about some last minute tweaks, and I respond as best I can. After that, it's out of my hands and off to the localization team for translation!
So, long story short (ha! get it - I wrote too many words, again!) I stuck very closely to my pitch because A) it was a short story anyway, and B) because it was what had been approved by the stakeholders so deviating from it would have raised some questions.
I make a beat sheet (also called a beat outline).
I use it to pitch the story to peers, coworkers, people innocently gettting coffee near me. Then generally i revise the beat sheet a couple times, before turning it into an outline. Always forcing myself to completely rewrite it (lazyness is a great editor, if u don’t feel a beat is important— why are you copying it?). I will often jump between writing it on a white board, onto a computer, then yellow legal pad, then back to whiteboard.
If there’s any flux from the beatsheet to outline tend to recheck and redo the beatsheet.
If i cant get the story to work as a beatsheet, i abandon the story or start from the premise —throwing away everything.
Only when I’m happy with the beatsheet and outline do i begin writing.
With a short story i might skip the outline— but never the beatsheet.
Best of luck!
Im no writer but you may be interested in this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1niXfgdFcdU&list=PLTT-Xb7kSZWWdgWGER_CroAif3-BxYRJH&index=2
It honestly depends on what I'm writing. Lately though, its been champion concepts and their lore, which normally starts off as an idea or picture. Then I just... Go, really. I have about 26 champion concepts, all in various stages of development. Some don't even have names, just ideas. Others are almost complete. I am just... Easily distracted.
So, in other words, I do plan ahead to some extent. I honestly just write stories in my head and keep them there until I feel like actually writing them, constantly changing them and adding new ones on top of them. My writing is extremely lacking in quality though, so my process may not work the best.