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@ajaj2000 So it sounds like your natural instinct is pantsing, and where you are at right now in your writing journey, you are seeking to balance out this tendency by learning how to plot/outline better.

This is definitely a good move! Each of us approach writing a little differently, but we are all on a journey to become better writers each year, month, and even day. Just one little bit at a time. So I think it’s fantastic that you’re taking steps to balance out a trait that may lead to weak writing for you.

And it sounds like @morreafirebird may be able to help you better with your questions about Weiland’s method than I can. 🙂

Even then, however, I would say that you have to always remember and accept the fact that at heart, you are a pantser, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The #1 thing that I would suggest is:

Write more, knowing that it won’t be your best work.

The biggest help to me in learning how to write better was not any particular book that I read, or advice I was given, but actually sitting down and doing the writing myself. I learned to follow what I call “writing instincts” – where I could start to sense the things that worked and the things that didn’t work. I based a lot of these instincts off of the good (and bad) literature that I had read. If you’re paying attention, you’ll start to pick up on what makes great stories great and what keeps mediocre stories from being even better. (Reading good books about this is definitely okay, too!)

At the end of the day, if you are going to apply what you see in other books to your own writing, you have to build the muscles to get there – by actually writing day by day. And it won’t be our best writing, because we’re still learning. We’re still on our journey. We’re still improving. Our best work is always the thing we’re going to write next.

It’s like working out. You can watch professional weight-lifters a lot and have a really great understanding of proper form, but until you actually do it yourself, you won’t actually have gained any muscle.

So write. And be okay with the fact that it isn’t going to be your best work. Many times, that’s the only reason that makes me pick up my pen and jot down my thoughts – this is practice, and by doing this today, I’ll be better a better writer tomorrow.

Sometimes the best we can do right now is exactly what we need to do to get there, when it will be our best work. Don’t let difficulties with your outlining keep you back from actually continuing to write. 🙂 It might just be that if you go back to pantsing, the things you’ve learned from Weiland’s book will automatically start to surface in a whole new way, because you’ll be thinking in those terms now. Who knows?! That’s how it works for me a lot of the time. 🙂

 

As for my personal method, it’s definitely not one that is easy to pin down. There are two ways I approach this.

In my head, the longer a story simmers, the more full the plot gets and the more apparent the themes become. So if a story has been knocking around upstairs for a couple years, then I probably have a pretty good idea of the story’s outline.

But if it’s a new idea and I’m just beginning to write it out, I develop the plot as I write. There is one short story in particular where I did this, and it seemed to work really well. After the first few scenes, I had to stop and ask myself where the story was headed. What themes had I begun to sow, and where were they pointing the story? I thought I had a few vague ideas about what that might be, so I followed those threads and wrote some more of the story. By then I was beginning to see the themes emerging more prominently and knew that I had listened well. But I still didn’t know how to finish the story. So I stopped writing and thought about the story some more. I looked at the themes that I was confident were well-developed, and sure enough, after a little brainstorming, the ending came to me. This was a very interesting and fascinating experience, because before I wrote this story, I had never started a story without knowing how it ended.

To some degree or another, I have used this method to help me write every story since. Now, I haven’t done this with a full-length novel, so it is probably not something that works as well in that situation. But what I like about it, in general, is that it forces me to listen closely to what I have written, and allow that to shape the direction of the story. At the end of the day, there is a sense in which I still end up outlining my story – just not all at once.

If you take it in stages and listen well, you can narrow down which direction the story should go with greater and greater strictness as you get closer and closer to the end. By then, it will feel as if the story wrote itself. And in a way, it will have! It doesn’t make it any easier  to do the actual writing, but at least you’ll know that the story has a consistent theme and a good plot development – almost as if you had sat down beforehand and outlined it all out.

But again, that’s just the way that I have found works for me. It may well be that you will find your own combination of outlining and pantsing; or, you might have a breakthrough and stick with outlining, after all. 🙂

Well, gotta go! Please let me know about any other questions you have!