Do you plan before you write? Or discover as you write?
Shelby Foote, an experienced fiction writer, wrote 6 novels before turning to his real meat, history and the Civil War. He took an engineer’s approach to fiction, outlining each chapter meticulously, then expanding the outline and fleshing it out with essential detail. Only then would he “write.” Having finished a chapter, he gave it a light polish for mechanics, then never looked back.
John Irving, by contrast writes every day, with only a loose plan. As the pages pile up, key details emerge and the story takes shape. By page 150 or so he’s up to full speed.
For years, “Gone with the Wind” was an ungainly stack of manilla envelopes in Margaret Mitchell’s study. Each one contained a chapter in whatever stage of development it happened to exist. Every so often, she would pull one at random from the stack and revise. Then she returned it to the stack and pulled out another one. This went on for years.
I lean toward something in between the Mitchell and Irving methods. In the early stages, I try to know my story. For me, writing is thinking. I have a rough plan, but instead of working on a chapter-by-chapter outline, revising, re-revising, embellishing, and enriching it, I shift methods and plunge into the writing. I have to or I go nowhere.
How do you begin a story or novel? What’s your method?
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