scrape_r_rational/data/cache/2u66d2.md

[D][Q] Advice on planning?

Post:

I've pretty much been writing by the seat of my pants my entire life. I have a vague idea of what I want to happen, but that's liable to change whenever I think of anything better.

What I'm working on now, while not exactly rational fiction, I'm thinking will require heavy plotting. To avoid getting into too many details, let's just say it's going to go through a heavy amount of Cerebus Syndrome, but gradually enough that it doesn't suffer from Mood Whiplash.

Given the predominance of well-planned stories in /r/rational, I thought this would be a good place to ask about this.

Comments:

• u/alexanderwales:

  I have lately been using [Dan Harmon's story circle](http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit) method for story plotting. If Campbell's monomyth is descriptive, this is prescriptive. Part of it is just a breakdown of story parts, but it also incorporates some of the snowflake method, which I think it one of the more important things to do with plotting.
  
  The snowflake method is like this:
  
  * Figure out the core of your story, then write out all the major, high level plot points as one simple sentence each. You shouldn't have much more than a handful of sentences - if you have more than that, simplify.
  * Break each of those sentences down into further description of the series of events that they contain. "The protagonists break into the castle" is a sentence that could encompass a half dozen chapters - maybe part of breaking into the castle is wooing a chambermaid, pickpocketing a guard, crafting a magic spell to breach the defenses, having a conversation on the ethics of overthrowing the king, etc.
  * Keep doing this until you have roughly scene-sized chunks. Then, write those scenes, and you'll have a properly plotted book.
  
  If you're interested, I wrote up a three part series prior to National Novel Writing Month: [part 1](http://thingswhichborepeople.blogspot.com/2014/09/pre-writing-for-national-novel-writing.html), [part 2](http://thingswhichborepeople.blogspot.com/2014/09/pre-writing-for-national-novel-writing_25.html), [part 3](http://thingswhichborepeople.blogspot.com/2014/09/pre-writing-for-national-novel-writing_28.html). The first four (unedited and very raw) chapters that resulted from that planning can be seen [here](https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3221980/1/The-Dark-Wizard-of-Donkerk), though I have to say that I didn't feel the need to hew too close to my plotting.
  
  If you want to shift your tone, even gradually ... that's a tough thing to do. You run the risk of attracting people that will love the early stuff but grow disenchanted with the later stuff. It's quite possible that you don't care about audience at all, but if you do, it's better to keep the tone relatively consistent. Include a lot of foreshadowing of the bad stuff that's going to happen, and keep in grim comic relief (or however you're planning to balance your moods).
  

• u/OffColorCommentary:

  I haven't tried my hand at writing, but I have made a lot of games.  Calibrate your grain of salt appropriately.
  
  What I've found is that you need to nail down your thematic pillars and, in abstract, how you plan to achieve them, and write all of that down.  Figure out what structure is required, and then studiously stop before filling in the fun parts.
  
  Coming up with all the details and bringing it to life is a lot of fun, so it's easy to write it all down and plan to convert it to your finished product, but if you do it all up front then later on you'll lose your connection with what made the premise fun.  And then you won't be able to make it fun for the reader either, or worse just get discouraged and give up on the work.
  
  I'd also recommend the book Save The Cat, which is the best attempt I've read to actually establish what a good story structure looks like.  It should be more directly transferable to writing than it is to games anyway.
  

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