Don’t Plot, Write

It’s an odd thing: When I sit down to write, I really enjoy it. I mean, I love the whole process, the searching of my imagination for what happens next, the composing of sentences, the figuring out how to add that extra dimension to a paragraph or twist to the story. The whole process of writing is quite fun. There are odd thing is that for over 20 years of my life I didn’t enjoy writing. So what changed?

I enjoy writing now because I now know how to write. Up until about two years ago, my attempts to write focused on creating a highly imaginative plot, stitching all the various subplots together, and then writing out everything to fill in the actual story. I didn’t enjoy writing the story, as I had already envisioned the story in my head and imagination. What I was doing was composing words that would illustrate the story. This is a subtle but powerful difference.

The biggest difference is that today I can totally get lost in a scene I’m writing. Before I had already imagined the scene in all its glory, and I was trying to describe what I had seen in my head based on my memory. Another pitfall is that stories have natural ebbs and flows. Sometimes you are writing a scene that does little but reveal a bit of a character or take you from one important point to another. These can still be important scenes and chapters, but they just aren’t as much fun to write if you know that a killer scene is coming up soon. As a result, you tend to rush through the scene, botching in the process.

Let’s go back to my first point, however, about writing a scene from memory, as this happens in important scenes, not just trransitional ones. If, for example, you imagined the scene weeks earlier as you plotted out your novel, odds are that you imagined all the cool things that would happen. Now, as you are sitting down to write, you aren’t creating, you are trying to remember those cool things. More often than not, you’ll forget some of them, and that will be even more frustrating. The result is not a very vibrant or engaging chapter, even if all the ideas and story behind it are brilliant.

So getting lost in a scene is critical, and writing from memory is not conducive to that. At all. Stephen King writes about this in his book On Writing. He goes so far as to say that plotting a book is a big mistake. I agree with him 10o%. For 20+ years I plotted books to no effect. I stopped and am now writing well and enjoying it.

You can call this “writing without a net,” as it means you start a story and all of its subsequent scenes without a firm idea on how it is going to end. For Stephen King, this is situational writing–you imagine a situation and then just write the book on how that scene plays out. You can also call it concept writing: Pick a concept and then just write how you think it will go.

One of the final steps in transitioning into this form of effective story-telling was putting a leash on my imagination. That’s write, I had to clamp down and purposefully stop imagining, at least for the story I was writing. Most writers have absolutely stunning imaginations. This is, indeed, one of the reasons they write–they want to share their stories with others. The downside to this is that it is a lot easier to imagine a story than to actually write one. If you imagine a story all in your head and then prepare to write it, you fall into the plot trap I outlined above–you will no longer be getting lost in the scene as you write. You’ve already done that in your head. What you are then doing is trying to remember the scene and then dictate that on the page, a recipe for frustration and poor writing if there ever was one.

What you need to do is let you imagination loose entirely while you are writing. As you are imagining the scene, think of all the possibilities, consider the things that could happen, the suprises that are in store. All of those things that you love when you fantasize or imagine are what you should bring to bear when you are writing a scene of fiction. But here is the important part, and also the most difficult: Don’t look ahead more than just a little bit. Because when you do, you are losing sight of both the current scene and limiting your ability to get lost in that scene in the future. By all means, consider neat little plot twists that come to mind as you write your scene, but try not to think more than two steps ahead and, even then, make it as general as possible.

If your hero is trapped in a building, and you have just realized a brilliant way to get him out, and part of that escape leads to a fabulous reunion with his lost love, rife with possibility. Don’t think of the reunion! It is enough to know where your hero is heading–to the reunion–you don’t need to know all the details. You’ll think of those when you are writing the reunion scene. You shouldn’t be thinking of them as you are writing the escape scene.

Part of the difficulty in this is when you are not writing. Most of us love our creations. We think of our stories even when we’re not writing. Our characters engage us, and the tale we are writing is as if it were written just for us because, after all, it is!. However, you must put a lid on your imagination. Don’t think about the story, at least the story yet to be written. Don’t revel in the possibilities more than one or, at most, two scenes ahead. All of that is to be saved for when you are actually writing. As I said, this was the last hurdle for me, and it was a tough one. I love my imagination. I love to fantasize. And I love my stories. To consciously not think of them at odd times of day or night was extremely difficult. But I was able to do it, and I am glad I did. Now when I sit down at the keyboard, all that pent up imaginative energy explodes, and it goes right to the page.

Stephen King described this process as digging up a fossil. You have an initial idea or situation, and then you dig up a little at a time, not knowing quite what kind of dinosaur you are going to unearth. This metaphor is apt, for as you write you are unleashing your imagination one step at a time, digging up and discovering different parts. I would add a similar metaphor: Navigating in the dark with a flashlight. As you swipe the flashlight around, you can see your immediate surroundings in detail. You can also see various ways that will move you ahead or lead you out of the room you are in. But beyond that, it is dark–the light simply can’t penetrate the darkness more than a short distance. This is you as a writer: Letting your imagination illuminate everything in your immediate vicinity, and revealing enough of how to get beyond your current location. But beyond that–darkness.

The great thing about this method of writing is that all it takes is an interesting idea, and you can begin a novel. This idea can be a situation, a character with a flaw, or even someone feeling a strong emotion. Here’s an example from an unfinished work of mine. I had a very simple idea. What if a woman was unlucky in love, and on a fanciful whim decided to just search Google. Here is how that story started for me. As you may imagine, I have no idea where it will go or how it will end, and that is part of the excitement of writing:

I don’t know why I did it. Why does anybody do any number of crazy random things in their life? Maybe I was bored. Maybe I was curious. Maybe I was desperate. Hell, it could be all of the above.

All I know is that when I stared at that cute rainbow-colored Google logo and thought of how lonely my life had turned out to be, all I wanted to do was find one thing. So I typed the words that were closest to what I was searching for in life:

tall dark handsome

Not the most original phrase in the world, but it did kind of cut right to the chase. As I expected, I got a lot of eye candy, but every few pages there would be something totally unexpected and somewhat interesting. First there was the entomology lesson plan from Texas A&M University. Then there was the White Nationalist Community. I clicked on that one: It was a Dear Abby for racists kind of thing. Some woman wanted to know what to do: She was drawn to tall, dark, and handsome men rather than blonde men with blue eyes. Apparently attracting women is a big problem for racists with brown hair. But I digress.

I browsed through pages and pages of results for tall, dark, and handsome. Just when the tedium was about to overwhelm me, some other nugget would make me follow a cavalcade of links, whether it was a gallery of beautiful nature photographs (and unexpectedly sans men) or a treatise on the evolution of Arab features.

I searched on and on absent-mindedly looking for my tall, dark, and handsome man. Oh, I saw plenty of tall, dark, and handsome men. Did I ever, but I hadn’t found my tall dark and handsome man.

Until I hit the 321^st results page.

How deeply have you ever searched on Google? At a certain point you realize that all the results are pretty much the same and that the only thing that changes are those little nuggets that crop up ever few pages. On results page 321 I found what I thought was just a totally random nugget.

In fact, at first I almost skipped the result entirely, as it looked like the title of just another gallery of naked men:

You Have Found What You Are Looking For

I had seen plenty of galleries of men entitled “You DREAM Lover” or “Look No Further!” or “The answer to your prayers!” but the two line description of this item brought my eye back to the listing:

You Have Found What You Are Looking For

2626 Linden Avenue

Knock three times and wait …

This certainly wasn’t a bunch of asses, penises, and six packs. In fact, I thought it was kind of creepy how it looked like it was actually addressed to me. Curiosity got the better of me, so I clicked on the link. It was dead.

I shrugged and was prepared to move on when I realized I could do some nifty online detective work. I clicked on the “– Cached –“ link, not quite sure of what to expect. Part of me thought the page would open to a male escort service. Another part of thought I’d find a real estate site. What I wasn’t expecting was little more than what I found in the Google page cache, but that is exactly what was there:

You Have Found What You Are Looking For

2626 Linden Avenue
Knock three times and wait.
One knock more or one knock less—you don’t get in.

Admit it—you’re as curious as I was. Who makes a web site like this? What does it mean? Was it a top secret rave, and did I stumble upon its short-lived invitation page? Was it some sort of secret Freemason gathering site, which moves from server to server? Why did a search for “tall dark handsome” take me here?

The more I thought about it, the more intrigued I became. One of the things that kept gnawing at me was that I knew a Linden Avenue. It wasn’t too far from the Strip, and I had passed it a number of times in my life. Was this website actually pointing to the Linden Avenue in Las Vegas that I knew?

At this point I’d like to say that I looked up, saw that it was 3 AM, rubbed my eyes, turned off the computer, and went to bed, and I’d like to say that my life moved on—I finally found a great job, my life became exciting, and I found that tall, dark, and handsome man with whom I would spend the rest of my days happily ever after. But that isn’t true.

The truth is that I became strangely drawn to that simple page buried deep in a goofy Google search. I printed it up, and tacked it on the corkboard behind my monitor. I told myself that it was a humorous reminder of how random life can be. But it was clearly more than that.