029: The Best Brainstorming/Outlining Method for Pantsers
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The Best Brainstorming/Outlining Method for Pantsers
Hi, friend, I am a little nervous about triggering Pantsers with this episode. Ah, let me just be clear and say that this is not an episode telling Pantsers that they're wrong and they need to do outlining. This is just an outlining method. If you want to do like bare bones, minimal outlining before you start writing, if you maybe want to or more of a like a hybrid in between a plotter and a pantser. No judgment towards Pantsers yall are great. Just want to get that out of the way. And if you're not sure what I'm talking about, if you if the term pantser is new to you, or a plotter is new to you. I have an episode about that plotters versus Pantsers. It's episode 20...21. So talk about the different approaches and kind of some some benefits and drawbacks of both approaches. Because again, there's no one right way to write a book, I just want to echo that, again. I am someone who's kind of a hybrid when it comes to outlining and preparing before I start writing books. So that's why I found this message really helpful. And this is what I'm going to share with you today.
But I want to just take you back to how I approached the process of writing books, my first book that I wrote, and then my second book because they were different. And they informed how I settled on this, this process for book three that I'm using. Book One, I didn't really do any outlining, I started, I knew what I wanted to write about. I knew I wanted to write about different generations of women, I knew I wanted to write about alcoholism about family secrets. And I had an idea of the daughter the kind of main character in present day. And when I started, I thought that I wanted to do a third of the book from the daughter's perspective who's like 25, in present day. And then I wanted to do a third of the book from her mother's perspective back in 1980, when her mother was a kid. And then the grand a third of the book be from the grandmothers perspective in like the 90s. That was that was the original plan for the book is to have three different times and three different perspectives. So I got about halfway through writing some of the mother's perspective, some of the daughters perspective hadn't even sat down to write the grandmother's perspective yet. And I was like, I don't even know what I would say for her, I had a vague idea of what could happen in the grandmother's, you know, chapters in the 90s. But it just didn't really seem like there was any reason for me to have her perspective, like I was just kind of forcing it.
So I decided to scrap that idea and just have it alternate between the daughter in present day and then the mother in 1980. But that meant I didn't really know how to resolve it, because I didn't plan to write that much for both these characters. And I also didn't know how things would end like it was just, it was a mess. Got stuck, took a long break from it, because I couldn't figure out how to resolve it. And then eventually, obviously, I did and figured it out. But because of that experience, when I started writing Book Two, I was like, I'm not going through that again, I'm not going to get stuck halfway through or 75% of the way through. I'm gonna outline. So for Book Two, I wrote a very detailed outline, I wrote a couple of chapters or a couple of sentences for each chapter outlining what would happen in each chapter of the book. I knew the characters, I knew the scope of the story, I knew what would happen at the very end, like all of it, started writing and got to about the 10,000 word mark and realized this was not the book I wanted to write I didn't like it. It's just crap. Partly because I was writing from the perspective of a college student. This this 18 year old girl actually started right before she went to college. So she was still in high school. And I didn't want to write from the perspective of a college student. I wanted to write from the perspective of someone who's a little bit older looking back on their experience in college. That's what I wanted to write about. So then all of that outlining that I did just went out the window because I was changing it completely. So I had to scrap that got to about 10,000 words, scraped it again, like it took a while to kind of get it but then once I got it, it obviously worked out. So so after scrapping all of that, and starting and stopping again, I decided to implement to us "save the cat writes a novel" as my outlining method.
It was save the cat was a book that someone in my writing group introduced me to. And originally saved the cat was a book written for screenwriters, it was a book on screenwriting. And then someone wrote a different version of that book, kind of applying the same concepts to writing a novel. So it's called Save the cat writes a novel. And it's a whole book about this method. And there are different beats or different points that you have to hit in the story. And there are lots of examples of movies in save the cat that have this approach. And they kind of give you examples like, well, this is where this happens in The Hunger Games. And this is where this happens in this movie. And it, it was a lot for me to wrap my head around. I love save the cat, I think it's super helpful. And it creates it helps you create very cinematic stories, but it was a lot like I had to really I had I read the book covered cover and still didn't have a great handle on it, it took me a while to plug all of my plot points into this kind of framework. It was just a lot of work. And it was it was a bit more work than I wanted to do, I wanted something easier than save the cat. So now recently, if you haven't listened to the podcast before, or are hearing about my writing for the first time, I'm someone who, it's very easy for me to start stories. And then I kind of lose steam around the 10,000 word mark and have to set things aside because I'm I'm like questioning what I'm doing. So I have three books that I've started within the last year or two. And, but the one that I'm moving forward with the one that I'm most lit up by and excited by is I picked one that I'm going with.
So I didn't want to do save the cat again for this book, because like I said, it just felt like it was a lot for me to wrap my head around, I briefly plugged some plot points into a W outline, and I broke down the W outline in a series of tiktok videos, I might do a podcast on the W outline because I do think it's it's not as complex as something like save the cat and identifying the different beats. But yeah, just just kind of lost steam with that, and finally settled on this method that was just so much easier, so much simpler. Didn't take as long. So that's what I'm gonna present to you. You're gonna laugh It's so simple. And you might have been doing this already, like maybe you you have sort of intuitively just like done this without even realizing and thinking like, Oh, I'm outlining, I'm planning, I'm plotting my book. Basically, what you do is you write either by hand or you get a you know, Microsoft Word document, Google Doc, something, pull it up, and just brain dump, write down everything that you know about the story.
And even if you're still figuring out what the story is, maybe you're just the beginning stages, and you only have, let's say you only have an image that came to mind of two characters in a particular scene, write that down. If you have an idea of a main character that you really want to explore, write down everything that you know about that character. If maybe the setting came to you first, like I'd love to, I'd love to write a book here in this really unique setting., write that down. Just no matter how small the detail is that you know, get it all down brain dump. This might look like fully formed sentences so that when you get done, you have like, kind of a synopsis of what happens in the book. Or it could just be fragments, thoughts, you could jump from setting the character to potential plot idea all over the place. You could do bullet points just kind of listing out plot ideas or ideas about characters setting, whatever, just no one's going to see this. It doesn't matter if it's chaotic, it doesn't matter if you jump all over the place. The idea is that you are telling yourself the story as you're writing or you're telling yourself what you know, so far of the story. So get all of it down.
Once all of that is down on paper, step back, kind of look at it and see what you have and what you don't have. So maybe you have some plot ideas, but you really don't know anything about the main character then you know, you need to spend a little bit of time focusing on the main character and who they are, what they want their personality like all that stuff. Maybe you have a great understanding of the main character but you have no idea What happens to them? Like what happens in the plot? You've got nothing? Well, then it's time to think about, okay, what situation do I want to throw this character into? What conflict can I come up with that will prevent them from getting what they want. Maybe you have an idea of a plot, but you don't know the time period, it's going to be set in the setting any of that like, just then you know that that's something you have to explore.
And this is where brainstorming comes in. Just letting your mind wander, you can close your eyes, if that feels comfortable. And just let your imagination go. This is not something we're used to doing as adults, just letting our minds wander, daydreaming, brainstorming, whatever you want to call it, take what you have written down. And just let your mind kind of start filling in the gaps for you. And then as ideas come to you, you can start adding them to that document, whether their ideas about plot scenes, dialogue, even whatever it is. There's an episode I did, it's one of the first episodes that I did, it's about coming up with a book idea. So there are some strategies in there that you can use if you want to check that episode out. As far as like brainstorming and how to really do this, but don't be, don't be alarmed, if you can't fill in all the gaps. Yet, if there are a lot of big unknowns for you, that's okay, we are not doing a really structured, detailed outline where you have to know all those things, we're just doing a rough, giving yourself a rough idea of what the story is, who the main character is, what the conflict is, and where the story is set. That's really all we need. And then once you have that, then you can start to dive into the writing and just see what happens because that's the great thing about being a pantser. And also even being a hybrid writer, like, you just get to dive in and discover the rest of the story as you go. Things might change. Things might evolve as you get to know the characters and really get into the story. So and you have the freedom to do that when you are just kind of going off of a rough outline or a rough idea of the story. Now, if you're a plotter who wants to do this method, if you really want to get detailed with it, you can totally get detailed with it.
So maybe you've written a page, you can like develop that more, you know, just go into greater detail in each of the chapters and scenes like there's definitely room to do that. This is similar to something called the snowball method. If you've heard of that, I'll, I might do a separate episode on the snowball method. Because this is it's kind of similar to this but a little more structured. So I can I can talk about that approach too. But this was extremely helpful for me. One of the books that I started that I got to about 10,000 words on was a fantasy novel, and I'm not quite sure if it's young adult fantasy or adult fantasy yet. It's still too early for me to really say partly because I'm not sure how old the main characters gonna be. I Yeah, I'm just not sure. But what I did is I just brain dumped everything I knew about this world. And like any hint of an idea that I had about magical abilities, the kingdom like the characters, what they looked like, what their their kind of personalities were, what they wanted. ideas of the plot, and it's all, the document in the Word doc is like five or six pages, it's just like a chaotic mess of thoughts. But that's okay, it's, again, it's kind of like your first draft, it's just for you, it's going to be a mess, that's fine. It's just your brainstorming document. It's your brain dump. I even went on to Google and did like downloaded some stock photos of things that match the aesthetic or the characters and just copied and pasted those into the Word doc too. So it's like a living, breathing document.
And I know something like Scrivener or other programs, you have the ability to like really organize all this stuff. But I don't feel like I didn't feel like I needed that level of detail. I don't use Scrivener. So I just put it all in a Word document. Okay, so try this out if you're at a place where you want to do a little bit of outlining, but you don't want to go too in the weeds with it and to get to nitty gritty. It's just, it's so much easier to just kind of help you organize your thoughts and figure out what you know about the story and what you don't know what you still need to figure out. And then at some point, you know, after you've got that down like, then it's time to just dive in and start writing.
Alright, thanks for listening. See you next week.