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Marlo Garnsworthy, an illustrator, editor, and teacher who has been working with writers for over fifteen years, has a very good post at her blog, Wordy Birdie, called So You Want to Write for Kids: The Least You Need to Know. Read every word.

The parts I found particularly interesting:

Know Your Audience--Know the Genre. It's not unusual to hear of writers with a new children's book who know little about children's literature, itself. I've read recently about people wanting to write children's books because they enjoyed it as a child, but they don't read it now so they just don't know what's happening in the field. I really love hearing about authors of YA books who say in interviews that they just wrote what they wrote and their editors/publishers decided it was YA. You really can't depend on something like that happening. On top of that, my gut feeling is that people should know what they're doing, no matter what they do for a living. That includes knowing that you're writing YA.

Think Story, Not Message. How many adult readers tolerate reading message books? Why do so many people think it's a necessity for children's books? Teachers teach. Preachers preach. Writers should stick to stories.

Learn. Marlo says, "One of the things that always surprises me is that newer writers think they should automatically know how to write a publishable story." I'm extremely embarrassed to admit that that was probably the case with me when I was getting started. But I was wrong. Even before I finally got my first book published, I realized I needed to learn more. I needed to learn more after the first book was published and after the second book was published, too. My seventh and eighth books have some structural problems I regret. I should have known more. I have spent the last ten years studying and changing how I write.

I am quite taken aback when I am in elementary schools and teachers ask where their students can submit work for publication. A few years ago I was in a school and students were telling me their parents thought they should publish. To tell children they they know how to write a publishable story, to let them believe that, is such a disservice. Show them how they can learn how to write.

Get to Know People. This is more necessary now than it was when I was getting started, in large part because so many more people are trying to get into writing. Especially in children's writing there is all kinds of networking going on, and gatekeepers will remember names of people they've met or heard about through others they know. It won't get a bad manuscript published, but all things being equal, it could get that last bit of attention that makes a difference in who gets published or who moves up the ladder because s/he is known. On top of that, nowadays if you have a network of literary friends/contacts, those people will help promote your newly published book in many ways.

Marlo covers a lot of material in her post, and there's a reason for that. You really need to know a great deal in order to have a chance of getting into the publishing world.

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I began the Weekend Writer project a little over two years ago, because I was upset when a friend from high school was being pressured by a salesperson from some kind of pay-to-publish company. Last month in my local newspaper, I read about someone who had just published her first book. She had considered self-publishing, she said, but thought it was too expensive. Then she found a traditional publisher interested in her subject.

I had never heard of this publisher, but I'm not queen of the publishing world. I haven't heard of everybody. So I googled the name. Guess what? It was a pay-to-publish company. There's nothing wrong with that. Some self-published writers do use them. The issue here is that according to the interview this woman gave to the paper, she didn't know. She thought this company was a traditional publisher. A librarian friend who had seen the article said, "Isn't she going to get a bill at some point?"

What makes this story more disturbing is that when I googled the company name, the fourth site that came up was one at which writers who had paid the company to publish for them were reporting problems they'd had. We're talking a pay-to publish company with unhappy customers.

Don't Rush To Publish

You hear the expression "rush to publish" now in relation to self-publishing authors who want to get their book out right away. Speaking from experience, I can say that preparing a manuscript for publication can be nearly as much work as creating it in the first place. Writers need to learn nearly as much about publishing these days as they need to learn about writing. The difference between traditional vs. self-publishing seems as if it should be the very minimum writers should know. However, I've heard of other authors being asked questions by self-publishing authors that indicated that those particular self-publishers didn't have even a basic understanding of what traditional publishers do.

Wouldn't you know it, I have covered this issue here before: The Difference Between Traditional Publishing And Self-Publishing. If you are a new writer beginning to think about publishing, please read it.

But Let's Add To The Confusion

The line between traditional and self-publishing has become wobbly because some major traditional publishers have added self-publishing services, and many of them are all using the same company to provide those services. Check out Author Solutions and Friends: The Inside Story by David Gaughran at Let's Get Digital.

The bottom line here, folks, is that writers who plan/hope to publish need to educate themselves about publishing.

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I'm including  My Top 5 Tried and True Horror Tropes by Micol Ostow in a Weekend Writer post not because I think new writers need to know about horror. Though, of course, if you're interested in writing horror, you'd better. No, what interested me in this post is how she defines the difference between a trope and a cliché. "...there’s also a fine line," Ostow says, "between a “trope” or homage, and a cliché."

When you see people refer to "tropes," it's usually in a flattering way. I can't recall the last time I heard someone say something flattering about a cliché.

The big question (which may be answered in the workshop Ostow mentions, but we won't all be going to that, and it isn't until fall, anyway) is how does a writer make something like a haunted house, asylum, or possessed doll a trope/homage and not a cliché? I've often wondered, is a trope a trope if readers get it, otherwise it's a cliché?

So keep the cliché/trope issue in mind.

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote here about dialogue tags, the little bits in a piece of writing that indicate someone has spoken. Author Martyn V. Halm discusses some additional ways to deal with said and tagging in WRITING: Dialogue and the 'Said' Rule.

Also, in The Seven Deadly Sins of Dialogue, pay particular attention to Item 2, Impossible Verbing.

I caught both these articles at a Writer Unboxed Facebook discussion, by the way.

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I haven't done a Weekend Writer in quite some time. This week, though, I stumbled upon this post on dialog tags at Page Curl Publishing and Promotion. No idea, noooo idea how I find these things. But dialogue tags can be a problem for new writers, and this Page Curl post makes some good points. Thus, a weekend writer post.

Rule 3 is of particular interest to me. "Dialogue tags aren't a place to break out your thesaurus." Indeed. Fancy synonyms for "said" are distracting. On the other hand, if you've spent much time reading out loud, you know that the repetition of "said," all by itself, becomes distracting, too. This is one of the many cases in life where one must find a happy medium.

Also, it usually isn't necessary to describe how something is said. "...said happily..." "...said sadly..." "...exclaimed in despair..."  Try to show the way these things are said rather than tell your readers about it.

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When you've been writing for a while, studying for a while, attending workshops and/or classes for a while, you may start thinking about finding a writers' group to become part of. If for no other reason, you're going to be hearing about how wonderful they are. You're going to read author notes in which writers are filled with gratitude for members of their writers' groups.

Well, I've been a member of three writers' groups, and I can tell you there are writers' groups, and there are writers' groups.

The first one I was part of was small and made up of published children's writers who met in the writers' homes. It was terrific for networking, but I can't say I got a lot out of  it in terms of my writing. It dissolved after only four months. Unless...it continues to meet and no one told me. I have wondered.

The second writers' group I joined was a mixed bag as far as genre is concerned and met at a chain bookstore. I was the only published writer. One member was a very active SCBWI member who went on to publish a  well received children's book and is quite successful. Another member attended a day program at a local writers' conference one summer. This group met twice a month and required a lot of time outside the meeting for reading and preparing feedback. There was little helpful critiquing. Because of the time commitment and the lack of benefit, I left and that is how things stood for six to eight years.

As part of my interest in the benefits of community for writers, I decided to take a shot at joining another group. I stumbled upon one nearby that's connected with the NESCBWI and have been to two meetings.

What a difference. All the members I've met to date are "trained" even though they aren't published. They attend NESCBWI and SCBWI programs and know how to critique. They bring back info from programs they attend, talk about writing books they've read. The quality of the story ideas they're dealing with is far beyond what I recall at other groups I've attended, as is the quality of the writing.

So far, this is a stimulating experience. But it took me three shots to find this. Like me, you may find that
you have to keep trying.

You can always consider starting your own writers' group. How to Build a Writing Group in Your Community by Nathaniel Kressen at Jane Friedman can offer some help with that.

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Writing a novel is the gold ring of publishing. But realistically speaking, you might want to start out by writing something more manageable, something for magazines. How do you get started writing for magazines?  According to The Renegade Writer, you start writing for magazines by reading them.

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I've spent the better part of a month obsessing over a 1,000 word flash story, not one I was reading, one I was writing. I thought I was going to knock it off fast because I had a goal for my character, and I actually had an ending for the story. Or so I thought.

Flash Draft and Flash Revision

I wrote six or seven drafts before I got almost to the end of one. I'm at a point where I can put it away for a while. While I was going through this ordeal, I wondered if writing flash fiction could be a way to train to write other forms. Because flash is so short, you go through drafts faster and you can try different things faster, the way scientists use mice because their life cycles are shorter than humans so they can work faster. Over the course of my drafts, I worked on eliminating build-up and focusing specifically on the climactic moment.

Flash Addresses Writing Problems

Christopher Ramsey in Why I Teach Flash Fiction says, "In my class, flash has been a valuable teaching tool because it addresses all the issues a new writer might have in the context of their own writing." He says "the usual problems with new writers" include "too much backstory, too much filtering, authorial intrusion, and too many adverbs." Limiting yourself to 1,000 words addresses all kinds of "too much" problems.

Getting Started With Flash

 

Writing Flash Fiction at Fiction Factor

Stories In Your Pocket: How To Write Flash Fiction at The Guardian

Flash Fiction What's It All About? at The Review Review

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37 Books Every Creative Person Should Be Reading from BuzzFeed.  Among them:

Manage Your Day-to-Day

Bossypants

The Power of Habit

I think there are a couple of others on that list I read back before I started blogging.

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So you're writing and studying. You're not part of a MFA program, but you want to get some live instruction. Or maybe you're done with a MFA program and you want more or different live instruction. You start thinking about attending a writers' conference.

Zakia R. Khwaja at Scribe's Madness has a post on preparing for a writers' conference. And it involves more than putting together the right outfit. Her section on creating conference goals is the particularly important bit here, IMHO.

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An idea may feel terrific until you sit down to write something about it. Then you suddenly realize how very rudimentary it is. "...what to write or where to go with your idea..." is an initial problem that can put a stop to a writing project.

An Easy Exercise for Coming Up With Novel Ideas at Now Novel's blog is a great description of early planning using what you're interested in to get you started.

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I had a discussion this week with Kelly, my hair stylist (Thursday's cut--fantastic), about whether or not I have to feel like it to write. I could do a few thousand words, anyway, on that subject.

That did remind me of a brief article I saw in a Vermont publication I picked up last winter. Author Bill Mares (I remember his book, Real Vermonters Don't Milk Goats, written with Frank Bryan) was interviewed for what looked like an advertisement for Red Barn Books. The bit, the essence, that I liked best and that relates to the whole write-when-you-feel-like-it thing: "Writing is tough...Many writers want it to be a painless process, but it's not. I'm a Calvinist on this."

Like any Calvinist ever expected to do anything just when she felt like it.

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I see The Weekend Writer as being for beginning writers, so last week's post about reading is probably more appropriate than today's about managing your writing business. But there's stuff in Money, Writing and Life With Jane Friedman at The Creative Penn that might be eye opening for people planning a writing career.

• Risk tolerance--You need it if you're going to quit the day job. Personally, I think you need it if you're not going to quit the day job. You're putting a lot of time and energy and emotional whatever into a very risky venture that you don't have a lot of chance of being successful with. Whoops. Should I have said that?
• A way to manage the reality of limited and irregular income--Joanna Penn says that when she gave up regular income from a day job in order to write full-time, she sold everything. The house. The car. No debt and a lot fewer expenses so she could manage on a writer's income.
• The traditional model for writer's income vs. reality--The model is income from book sales, but how many writers live on that without teaching/workshop/conference income, appearances, work for hire? By the way, there's a glut of MFA graduates right now, hurting writers' chances of getting college teaching jobs. I've heard that elsewhere.
• Few sales from many books vs. many sales from few books--Penn and Friedman discuss this. It's something you hear about a lot from entrepreneurial self-published writers, too. What are the chances of one or two books generating a lot of sales? What are the chances of many books generating small numbers of sales each? If you can write a lot, you don't have to sell a large number of each book in order to generate some money.

That's just a sampling of the material you can pick up from this Creative Penn blog post. Read it because forewarned is forearmed.

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You know how new writers are advised to do a lot of reading? Yeah, well, this is one of those you-ought-to-read things. But different.

Author/agent Marie Lamba says in her Updating Your Image post that it's not unusual for her to see "submissions that feel dated." For people hoping to get into children's writing, in particular, this is often due to writers admiring the books they read when they were children. That is their idea of great writing and what they hope to model their own work upon. While the authors of that work from another time may have been doing something new, new is only new once. As Lamba says, "really great fiction of our time reflects today’s sensibilities and your experiences as who you are right now...Writing from a place that only takes in what fiction once was like too often just feels pokey." I would say feels "done," myself.

So when you're doing your reading, keep up-to-date. Read widely and read what's being published now, as well as rereading what was being published when you got excited about books. Think about this: In what other profession would you not keep up on what is being done in your field?

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I had eight books published with with one of the big publishers without ever having to write a synopsis. I barely knew what a synopsis is.

I am not bragging here, folks. I am explaining why things have been so tense around Chez Gauthier the last few days. I've been writing a synopsis that was requested after I made a submission. How bad did things get? My husband tried to ask me something this afternoon, saw I was still at my laptop, and said, "Never mind. Finish that #@!! thing."

While struggling these last few days, I came upon 6 Steps for Writing a Book at Marissa Meyer's blog. I wish I'd found it earlier in my own synopsis process. Read it now before you need it.

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Maintaining a journal is a big cliche in writer world, but it is also helpful. If you're a write-every-day person, it can provide you with opportunities to do that during those times when you're overwhelmed or traveling. Some of my most serious journal work has been done on vacation.

Lisa Catherine Harper has an excellent piece on writers' journals, Using The Writer's Notebook: A Practical Guide at Ploughshares' website. What's particularly good about her article is the variety of suggestions she has for notebooks/journals. You really can do anything with them.

While I do understand her point about handwriting with a journal, a journal computer program has the benefit of being searchable. Writers can go either way.

Here's some particularly good advice from Harper: "Be recursive. Don't write in your notebook and forget about it. Go back to read, underline, annotate, or dog-ear. Use Post-it notes to indicate important passages." I say this is particularly good advice because working on my journals is something I've failed to do. I've definitely been a dump-and-run writer. Paying more attention to my journal could oen a whole new world.
___________________

Remember to comment in order to have a chance at winning an eBook edition of Saving the Planet & Stuff.

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Since the Weekend Writer began as a sort of training opportunity for beginning writers, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss Charles Finch's guest post, The 5 Differences Between Professional And Amateur Novelists, at Writer's Digest. Finch is the author of the Charles Lenox mysteries (I've read at least two of them), making him a professional.

Finch explains his points in greater detail, but basically he argues that the amateur and professional writers differ regarding tools, patience, focus, habits, and practice. Tools, patience, and focus are of most interest to me.

• Tools: Professionals are interested in nitty gritty aspects of process.  Amateurs haven't gotten to that point yet.
• Patience: Amateurs suffer from what has become known as the "rush to publish." Professionals have had the experience of recognizing problems in a manuscript after it has sat for a while. They want to find and fix those problems, not publish them.
• Focus: Amateur writers often don't focus, spreading themselves too thin over an array of projects.

Today's lesson, then, is:

1. Create a process and pay attention to it
2. Accept that writing requires time, then take the time to do it
3. Stay on task. 

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A Baking Metaphor

Yesterday I made the cookies you see to your left. No, they were not supposed to come out like that. I got distracted when I realized I was out of dark chocolate and would have to use regular and ended up using three times as much as I needed. I couldn't scoop any out, so I doubled everything else, hoping to make things work in some magical way. As you can see, the first batch of cookies were shapeless blobs. Not magical. Not any good magic, anyways.

But I had a lot of cookie dough, and I didn't want to waste it. So I tried dumping it all in a cake pan thinking that if worse came to worse, I could break it out of there, freeze the crumbled result, and we could eat it with ice cream until Halloween. And after I took it out of the oven, I thought that was what I'd have to do.

But when I got up this morning, I discovered that someone else (well, it was my husband) had been able to cut tidy bars out of the pan for breakfast. Sure enough, I was able to take a disappointing mess and turn it into bar cookies.

So What's The Metaphor?  

 

Well, writing projects often don't turn out the way we originally envisioned them. And that can happen after putting a lot of time and effort into them. Did a novel requiring a lot of research not work out or find a publishing home? That material might be turned into a piece of nonfiction. Published essays frequently turn into books of nonfiction a few years down the line. Writers may realize that a novel should have been a short story. I have a middle grade manuscript I couldn't place, and I've made one pass at turning it into a book for adults. I'm working on an essay right now that was originally a workshop proposal.

It's as hard to see words and time go to waste as it is to see butter, flour, and cocoa. Writers who are trying to support themselves with their work can't afford to just forget about projects that aren't panning out. They have to salvage them somehow, if they can.

So while you're writing, keep thinking about options. You might need them.

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Last week I wrote about hybrid authors, authors who publish both traditionally and as self-publishers. Among other things, self-publishing means being responsible for your own covers, something I found difficult with Saving the Planet & Stuff. I knew what kind of feel I wanted in the illustration, but I had trouble hunting around on-line for illustrators who projected what I was looking for. I also realized that there was a difference between an illustration and a book design. I found book design mystifying. Fortunately, I found someone within our family's circle who was able to take care of both the illustration and the design. (Someone who appears to have taken down his website.)

In the March/April issue of the SCBWI Bulletin, author Chris Eboch has an article Cover Design in which she discusses for self-published authors the very issues I was dealing with. She describes pulling together a couple of other authors to help study recent fantasy covers in order to pinpoint the elements she wanted for her book, The Genie's Gift. In her case, she found both an illustrator, Marlo Garnsworthy, and a designer, Alan Erickson. And Chris explains how design differs from illustration. Design involves "choosing and placing text elements," which includes fonts. Fonts are important in terms of their appearance and their placement. And as I learned, some of them are copyrighted. You can't use just any font.

Chris points out that self-publishing can be expensive, something I think many inexperienced writers don't realize or consider. Editing and covers are the two big expenses. They're the two elements of a book that show big time, if they're not well done. Chris says to expect to spend several hundred dollars if you need to hire an artist for an illustration. I've seen the price range of $600 to $2500 in a couple of different places. And then, remember, that that might not include design.

So, writers, once you get the book written, you have a whole new task ahead of you.

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Since The Weekend Writer is a series for new writers, I'll send those readers over to the IndieReCon site to study up on hybrid writers. Hybrid writers, like my car that runs on both gas and electricity, operate two ways.  They publish both traditionally and on their own.

Notice that agent Lara Perkins says that among the benefits of being a hybrid author is "hybrid authors often enjoy greater creative control over self-published titles and over the scope of their career since they have more control over what to publish, when, and how." An example? I'm familiar with a situation in which a traditionally published children's author is interested in pursuing publication for an adult work. (Hmm. Another type of hybrid?) Her agent and publisher are discouraging her, wanting her to be firmly branded as a children's author first. The writer is concerned about striking while the iron is hot (she's done well with her first book). Also, branding could be a two-edged sword. The adult publishing world may not be interested in her once she's been branded as not one of them. There's definitely an issue there about who is in control.

Notice that Perkins also writes about the challenges for hybrids. They are essentially "running a small business." It is "a tremendous amount of work." And speaking from experience, I can tell you that while you're doing the tremendous amount of work of running the business, you have trouble finding time to do more writing. For all the control that traditional publishers get over writers, they also take over a lot of the nonwriting burden of publishing.

Understand the pros and cons of both types of publishing.

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Earlier this week, Liz B. from A Chair, a Fireplace and a Tea Cozy and I were discussing an episode of House Hunters over at Facebook. We'd both seen a show involving a couple who used what Liz called "alter egos." Husband and wife were of Italian heritage and would occasionally start talking to each other in stereotypical elderly Italian voices. They referred to themselves as something like Luigi and Lucinda when they were in old person Italian mode.

Liz and I were in agreement that this was an odd aspect of personality to want to expose on TV. However, the real estate agent for the episode, who was a friend of the wife, said the house hunting couple used the Luigi and Lucinda characters to help them work out disagreements. This made sense to me, though I still wouldn't have wanted strangers, or maybe even anyone else, to know about it.

What does this have to do with us? Well, Lucinda was pregnant. And while Liz and I were going back and forth about this, I pointed out that some day after that child is born, s/he is going to hear those voices coming out of Mom and Dad. I suggested it was a book idea.

But what kind of a book idea? 

That set-up--a child with parents who speak to each other in funny voices--is a situation. It is not a story idea because it doesn't describe something happening to someone and, even better, suggest why it matters.

Situation: A child has parents who speak to each other in accented, elderly voices.

Story Idea: A child, realizing the accented, elderly voices his parents sometimes use when speaking to one another actually belong to the spirits of people from the past who have forced themselves into mom and dad's bodies, must find a way to free his folks and bring happiness to his family for the first time.

A situation is static and doesn't give writers much to work with. A story idea is far more dynamic. It gives writers a direction to work in and even gives a hint of some action.

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I'm in the midst of a big revision right now, and I'm doing things a little differently. I had two influences.

The Plot Whisperer

In The Plot Whisperer Martha Alderson writes about making sure that scenes include dramatic action, character development, and thematic significance. I'm working with a chart to keep track of those three elements in each chapter. What about material that doesn't relate to any of those things?

Some Disappointing Reading

For several years, one of my sons and I have been slowly making our way through a beloved fantasy series. I gave him the next volume last year for Christmas. He passed it on to me earlier this year with the comment, "It's not very good."

I finally started reading it a few weeks ago, and I have to agree with my offspring's assessment. Right away I could tell what was bothering me about the book. There was lots of clever, even amusing, material that didn't relate to any story. It didn't deal with the dramatic action and character development Alderson wrote about, and that early into the story I had no way of knowing if it had anything to do with thematic significance. This somewhat random wordiness made the book  slow reading. It was difficult to tell just what the narrative line was, so I had little desire to follow it. In fact, I've put the book aside.

What Does This Mean For My Project?

Taking the two influences together--Alderson's contention that dramatic action, character development, and thematic significance be included in every scene and my reading of a book with scenes that included a lot of material that didn't relate to any of those things--led me to become hyperaware of material in my manuscript that had nothing to do with action, character, or theme. What I'm finding is that a lot of that material no longer seems necessary. It drags down my reading. So it's being cut.

Right now I'm not missing it.

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I have made two attempts at writing a picture book. The first time, the editor I submitted it to said the humor was more appropriate for middle grade students, suggested I rewrite and resubmit it. That became my first book, My Life Among the Aliens. When I tried again, a writing group partner suggested that effort would work better as a chapter book. My editor agreed with her. That evolved into A Girl, a Boy, and a Monster Cat.

My take away from these two experiences is that not every idea is appropriate for a picture book. Unfortunately, I've got nothing on what exactly is a workable picture book idea.

I have another take away on picture books from a teacher's conference I attended in 1999. Cecilia Yung explained that the pictures in picture books don't just illustrate text. They actually carry part of the story themselves. Things like setting, characters' emotions, some action don't appear in the text. They appear in the illustration. A reader takes in the whole story at once through text and image. The illustrations in a picture book can even have their own storyline.

This was kind of mind boggling to me. It's one thing for author/illustrators to create a picture because they can work both aspects of the story at the same time. But how do writers working on their own create a story that doesn't include large amounts of the information that goes into the illustrations but isn't so bare bones that agents and editors don't find it uninteresting?

Clearly, I've never been able to work that out.

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Remember what we were talking about the last time I did a Weekend Writer? Plotting vs. organic writing. I had been discussing plotting in earlier posts and decided it was time to talk about the fact that some people find plotting difficult and go about writing a different way.

Frequently I will read that we organic writers don't want to plot because we believe it will confine us in some way. Not this organic writer. I would love to have a plot in front of me that directed me what I should be doing, say, tomorrow morning when I sit down to write. I think my issue is much more the one I mentioned last time, Martha Alderson's contention that we organic writers see the big picture, stories as a whole and have trouble with details. Without details, it's hard to generate the material we need to get to that whole story big picture we can see or maybe even feel.

I've often wondered why organic writers are called organic writers. Is it because we sort of grow a story, as if it's some kind of living organism that we can't control, can only nurture? That's a little woowoo for my tastes. You sometimes see definitions of organic that involve interconnectedness or elements that are part of a whole. That's what I think is the issue for me and my kind.

Remember, "plot" is only one of the elements of fiction.  Opinions vary on how many elements there are, but whatever the number, organic writers have trouble isolating one of them, plot, from the others. For us, character is most definitely tied up with plot, and plot can be tied up with setting, and voice and theme can be tied up with everything. We can't separate one thing and work on it all by itself. We can certainly try, but we find ourselves reworking things over and over again because, for us, character interaction suddenly leads to something happening we hadn't plotted out and as we get more and more involved with a theme new ideas for how to present it may suddenly appear. All the different elements offer up material at some point or another, not just plot, and not in a very orderly manner.

We have to juggle the whole thing all the time whether we like doing it or not. But sometimes juggling is easier than others. And the next time we get together, I'll talk about that a bit.

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I am an organic writer, as I said earlier this month, which makes it difficult for me to talk about plotting. What is an organic writer, you ask? I've seen references to us for a long time, but usually the references aren't very involved, as if many people aren't clear on what we are. ("I may not know organic writers, but I recognize one when I see one!") We are said to write by the seat of our pants. Thus you sometimes hear us referred to by the mildly vulgar term "pantsers." We are said not to plot. I once saw a blogger describe us as using our first drafts to find our stories, meaning we sit down to write before we know what our story will be.

Plotters, on the other hand, presumably plot out their stories before they start to write. My understanding is that they know what they're going to write, they just have to sit down and do it. I once read a plotter describe spending three months working out his plot before he started actually writing. I don't know if most plotting writers do that, or if plots spring from their heads fully formed, or how they work at all. I can only guess what they do.

My last Weekend Writer post dealt with The Plot Whisperer by Martha Alderson. Alderson provides some of the best writing on organic writers that I've ever seen.

Organic writers, she says, tend to think in pictures, as in "the big picture,"  rather than language, while plotters go the other way. They are more analytical and detail oriented. Organic writers tend to prefer writing about characters while plotters prefer dramatic action. Organic writers tend to see a story as a whole and are short on details. Plotters tend to see the story in its parts. Organic writers may concentrate on character and end up being weak on the action that drives readers to stick with a story. Plotters may concentrate on action scenes and lose readers who need human interest.

I agree with a lot of what Alderson has to say about organic writers. Our interest in the big picture tends to leave us going, Okay, how do I get to that big picture? This is why formulaic plotting plans often aren't very useful for us. They involve coming up with details. A problem to solve and roadblocks to solving said problem or, heaven help me, metaphorical doors to go through or not are more mystifying than not for us. If I have problems coming up with details, telling me to come up with details isn't going to provide me with a lot of help.

Plotters are like engineers who design every element of a project so that it can be built into a completed whole. Plotters supposedly know what's going to happen in their story after they have their plot worked out, just as engineers know how their project will turn out once they've finished their, though both may have to make some changes before the job is done. Organic writers are also like engineers, engineers who have to "fast track" a project, meaning construction begins before they've finished the design. Organic writers frequently begin writing before they even are clear on what the basic story is going to be. Their process is all about design changes.

In future posts, I'll have more to say about writing process for organic writers.

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