How many novels have you started? Personally, I run out of fingers, toes and all the spare appendages nailed to my shelf counting that one. And how many have you finished? Not even "in the envelope" finished, but just a story with a beginning, middle and end, without any sections labelled "TODO" or "This doesn't work"? A substantially smaller number, I'd wager. So, how do you get there from here?

I'm not an outliner. If I plan out a story, it's only going to tell me how the story won't go: I can never stick to a story plan when I'm actually writing. Unfortunately, so many of the first-draft-carrots involve breaking your story down into sections and chapters and scenes, and just focussing on writing those, without getting lost in the whole story. Which is a brilliant idea - nobody can keep a whole story in their head all at once. But if you don't plan, how can you get there?

The Ideas Box

For my first novel Phoenix (currently buried in the filing cabinet until it relinquishes its love affair with explosions) I adopted a technique akin to Kenneth Atchity's index card megaplan. It ran something like:

1. Spend three months scribbling ideas onto index cards - at least 1500 cards. One idea per card.
2. Sort the cards, throw away one third
3. Stare at the remaining cards until a plot emerges, and put them in the order of that plot
4. Hope that what you've written is useful enough that you can, as Atchity puts it "write the connections between the cards".
5. Voila - novel.

It sounded so simple, a way to write a novel without really writing a novel, which is terribly seductive, and it involves months of not actually having to write a thing. Brilliant.

Well, it was a load of pants. 

It's one thing to write a story from a series of ideas that may or may not have any real connection with one another. It's another thing to expect that story to be any good. Yours may be, but I suspect it's a million-monkeys-and-some-typewriters scenario - it all depends on how your brain works with ideas. I spent three months writing things on cards - mostly worldbuilding, which I couldn't fit in, or ideas that wouldn't connect together, or things that were so vague so as to be useless by the time I reached step 4. I threw away a third, ordered the rest into what looked like a story and started writing.

About eight cards in, I stopped looking at the cards. Twenty thousand words in, I got stuck, went back to the cards, and found that nothing fitted with what I'd done so far, or where the story was going. The character motivations made no sense, the plot was just made of convenience, and I found myself resorting to making something explode every ten pages or so just to keep things moving.

Which is, thinking about it, pretty much what you'd expect when you tie a bunch of ideas together like balloons.

So who does it work for?

Filling a box with ideas that you hope to connect really only works if your mind is willing to stick on one main idea at a time, and break it down into tiny little aspects at random. If you're someone who likes to look at every detail and facet of a concept, turn it every which way and study it, and you're also someone who feels stifled by the idea of outlining your work from scratch, this is probably for you.

It's not me. While I can fill a box with ideas, they're usually big ideas - the kind where you put one or two together and there's most of your novel. Put more than a handful in together and they squabble over the soda. So I modified the method:

The Snippets Box

This one, at least, was a lot more fun. Instead of a box of index cards full of random ideas, I wrote snippets of story from random ideas. I got myself a little desktop wiki (I highly recommend WikidPad - it's usable by even the sternest luddite, runs on unix and windows, and has a host of nifty little features - and it's free) and wrote a random scrap of story for 15 minutes every day.

As I progressed, I found more and more of my snippets were about recurring characters, even continuing where previous bits had left off, or knitting two together.  When I was done, some nine months later, I had about 130,000 words of a potential novel, and another 50,000 words of completely random pieces.

I spent a day sifting through it, and pulling it together and realised that while I did have a near-cohesive storyline, it didn't resonate. There were some cool ideas I loved, but no emotional arc - again, things were happening because they were what I'd thought of at the time, not because they served a greater purpose to the story. If I wanted to use what I had in a novel, it would involve so much rewriting to build a plot around it that there wasn't that much point - I'd be better off building a plot without having to shoehorn that lot in.

So who does it work for?

If you already have a strong sense of what your story is about - the character arcs and motivations - but you don't want to write linearly, this might work for you. It's also great if you're a big-ideas person like me - having to actually write the idea forces you to explore the smaller details - but it probably won't give you a novel of itself. Additionally, it's a great tool for exploring character without writing dossiers, or worlds without writing a million lists and definitions.

The reader's digest draft

So I've settled on what I think is working for me now. I've picked up another (free) software package called yWriter, which is a story-organiser-cum-word-processor that lets me break things down into chapters and scenes-within-chapters, and make notes on the scenes as I go. And I'm doing a cross between the two ideas above, and just plain old writing-from-start-to-end. When I have an idea for a future chapter, I make a note of it - it'll sit waiting until I get to it. When I figure out how that chapter will break down into parts, I create the scenes, and make notes in those.  

I'm writing the novel in a digest format: it's a kind of story shorthand. Events without description and pacing, no fleshing out of moments - things just happen, and then the next thing happens, and the next. I'm getting through the story so I can build the emotional arc, make sure the plot makes sense, the character motivations are true. Then I go back and fill in the scaffolding. Some sections are already on draft two, so it's showing signs of success.

When I write something that means something else has to happen earlier, I can just insert another scene where it needs to go, or leave a note to myself in the scene that somebody needs to realise this, or see that, or not be there at all. Because I'm writing notes as I go that are right there next to the actual writing, I can jump around where I please, and write any part of any chapter or scene without losing the overall thread, without having to plan it out beforehand.

I'll reserve official judgement until draft three...

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