Writing Help

To plot or not to plot?

Originally, this was meant to be a conference talk, so it has a special format. I believe that makes it easier to read - plotting IS a reather dry subject. In any case, hope this is helpful, if you do have any questions related to plotting, I suggest you seek me out on my personal profile linahanson, where I tend to hang out more regularly and you will get an answer much quicker. 

Cheers! 

To PLOT or not to PLOT?

You just want to write and don't need pesky structuring?

You have millions of reads on your Wattpad stories, so why bother?

Plus, plotting sounds dead boring?

Relax you're fine – if you're satisfied and happy and don't ever want to leave the Wattpad environment. No need to read on.

If you, however, still have that niggling ambition of making your story as good as it can be, perhaps even good enough to get published outside Wattpad—well then maybe you might want to read on after all.

What this talk will give you: Tips and an easy-to-use tool to professionally structure your novel, to avoid the dreaded writer's block and to ultimately help you with (developmental) editing. As an extra, it will even assist you with writing the dreaded synopsis (booooh!!!).

What this talk won't give you: You won't be able to churn out an award-winning novel at the push of a button. For that, you'll still need your creativity, your imagination, your way with words and all your skill as a writer. But the tool will make things a bit easier for you.

Sounds like a tall order? Well, it works for me. My "tool" (it is a template more than anything) is based on a lot of research, a lot of practice and even more sweat and tears. No blood though, I refused to go that far.

To get what the heck I'm on about, you'll need to have a basic understanding of how story writing works. So, if you've never participated in creative writing classes or you've never read any of the gazillion writer's guides, you'll probably have the odd question. But I'll try to be as clear as possible.

Sitting comfortably? Let's begin.

Stories and Plots

How do you write your stories? Silly question, you'll say. You sit down, grab a computer, laptop, smart phone, or even a sheet of paper and a pen.

Don't laugh. I said, don't. I can hear you . . .

There are authors out there who write their stories by hand, believe me, and not a few of them either. Anyway, no matter what tools a writer uses, the result is words in a document. A whole string of them - sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters.

Or perhaps, in the first draft, you might not even have as much as that. You just end up with random thoughts in one long manuscript. I just used a significant term - First Draft. Also often called vomit draft. Erk.

Whatever the first draft means for you, and no matter how it looks like, this piece of writing is usually just that. A draft, the beginning of a creative process. To be honest, it is probably the most creative part of the whole writing business. Here you can just go all out, write whatever comes into your head, ignore punctuation, ignore style, plotting, writing rules - anything goes. All you have to do is write. Be you. It's all yours. Usually, nobody other than you will see it. Not even your beta readers. Unless you're on Wattpad. Here you might well run into a quite a few unkempt first drafts.

And why not? The experimental nature of this platform allows you to share all those precious ideas of yours with a word-hungry global community of readers. And because it's all free, you don't need to worry so much about quality.