I’m just curious as to whether you tend to write by the seat of your pants (without a story form) and then create the story form as part of your polishing process turning the rough draft into the finished form or if you write the story form first and use it as a guide while writing the rough draft?
What do you find works best for you?
Before. I’d never write if I waited for a complete plot outline or storyform.
But, I am somewhere in the middle. There’s a point where I say enough is enough! Then I write.
I can only speak for novels, but I’ve never really followed the same process twice. Each book is its own beast with its own peculiar challenges – none of which I seem to be good at predicting ahead of time.
Looking back at the last dozen or so books, I think the most effective process has been:
Write test scenes to prove the idea is good
I’ll write scenes (most of which end up in the book later on) for everything that needs testing: is the viewpoint character interesting/compelling/different from others I’ve written? Does the central mystery or question of the book feel dramatically engaging when it’s actually on the page (e.g. discovered by the characters)? Does this relationship grab me when the two characters are interacting?
Try for a Dramatica storyform
When I start putting this into Dramatica, does it suddenly inspire lots of interesting conflicts in each act? Most times it doesn’t the first go around, so then I try…
Some other outlining method
Screw it. If Dramatica won’t work this time, do my ideas naturally fall into some other method? Save The Cat? Pet The Dog? Feed the Rat? Spank The Mongoose? I’m not precious about these things and I’m not ideological about anything other than writing that which feels meaningful when I read it back. Most times, that doesn’t work either, so…
Start writing Act 1
By now there’s enough rattling around in my brain to take a character and see what they do when confronted by the underlying threats or conflicts I have in mind. If this goes great, terrific, but most times, I hit a huge, ugly wall. So I…
back to 2a.
For me, as a writer, it always comes back to whether I feel this story is real in some way – that I can go in my head and watch that movie play out and enjoy it. When that’s not happening, I’ll usually go first to Dramatica to see if that model can explain why I’m stuck, and then muck about with whatever else happens until…
Deadline is looming!
Damn it. Why did I spend all that time outlining? I’ve got a first act – sort of – and some other bits and pieces but now I have to push through. So I aim for the “Ugly Draft” – something that’s got lots of “well, I guess this could work” and plenty of stubs (an empty scene that says something like: “They head to the village only something bad happens to character X on the way and now they don’t know if they can keep going”). The result of this is something that’s often 1/2 to 2/3 the length of what the book will be, but it has an ending. I’ve never done this without finding an ending that I believe in.
Rebuild the outline
Now I’ve got the rough shape of a novel so there are enough stakes in the ground that it’s now the book that’s deciding if the outlining method works rather than the other way around. If Dramatica can’t explain the things I really want to have in the story (or if I can’t figure out why or how it explains it), then I let go for a while and just outline the old fashioned way. More often it does explain the pieces that I’ve decided are crucial, and gives me some places to explore the missing parts in-between (like, “maybe you want the relationship to explore Impulsive Responses here?”)
Write the One True Draft.
This one, though things large and small may change later on, truly represents the story I want to tell: it has all the storylines that matter to me and, on some level, they’re all connected (Dramatica might call this the inequity, though for me its just the dramatic essence of the story).
That was way more detail than I’d planned to write. Hope it’s useful to somebody (even if that somebody is just me!)
I work the the story form and all sorts of other tools, but am perfectly okay with getting it wrong and still digging in and writing. It’s an iterative process. You decide the story you’re going to tell, then write a little of it, then the story changes. Rinse, spin, repeat. You get used to it. Writing’s a journey of discovery or my God, why are you bothering. It’s just too hard otherwise.
I always have to write SOMETHING before I can even think about Dramatica. There has to be something in the characters that I want to pursue, get to know. Without knowing something about the characters Dramatica serves no purpose for me. It maybe why I have such trouble with Dramatica, because I can’t separate character from story.
Thank you so much for this. I often get so caught up in dotting the last i of some model, I lose faith in my gut knowledge of the novel I happen to be writing. What I actually like about Dramatica are its broad strokes rather than the minutitae.