There really is no ‘right’ way to write a book. The book having been written the ‘right’ way is determined by how much people like it. When looking at ‘right’ methods on this basis you rapidly find that there are a myriad methods, and many people claiming their set of rules infallible.
For them… they probably are. Belief in yourself is a big deal in this business, especially starting out. You spend a lot of time (or at least I did) trying to convince yourself that you can do this. Having at least one person who expresses faith in you helps a great deal — My wife and my brother Carl never once let me know if they did have doubts… so here I am. I owe it to them. And yes, some people did tell me I couldn’t do it, that I didn’t have the brains… Maybe they were right. And yet, here I am. My methods work for me. You may hate them and not make them work.
I am, I suppose from talking to many other writers, that somewhat rarer avis the plotter. I am also somewhat obsessive, and love to dot my Teas and cross my eyes. The plot WILL be complex. It will, if I do the job properly, not seem that way. The whole thing may be labyrinthine, but it will (if I have done it right, feel like a nice simple logical track.
The reason basically boils down to a sort of inverted decision tree. You see, most decision trees start at one point in the beginning and then split up, with the probabilities of each step allowing you to make decisions and choose the best path to the end. I start the other way around: at the end.
And then, because that would be too simple, at the beginning as well. And yes, I usually end up drawing them. It’s a case of Z happened, and A happened. I need to work my way back to A each of which has to be logical and most probable. For them to be most probable, something usually has to be foreshadowed. My character’s trousers are going to split at D. I have to mention he has grown four inches before point D and that his trousers are too tight… and so on. There is no particularly good chance of trousers splitting, without those factors. With them the two branches – split/ don’t split are 90% likely to split and reader is going to believe it plausible.
And so on. The end result is I arrive at fairly good outline not only of what happens, but what I have to foreshadow.
Of course – like any plan, it usually falls apart on contact with the enemy or keyboard. If I was a panster I’d run with that, I suppose. It’s happened. But mostly I go back and foreshadow in the requirements to make the course I set out for happen. Or get stuck because there are more decisions and factors I didn’t think of… then it has to fester a bit.
It works for me. I’ve now got the decision tree path for the rest of STORM-DRAGON mapped. And now to finish writing it.
Mad Genius Club 
7 responses to “Decision trees”
Oooo! Storm Dragon! Just the name would have sold me . . . well, just the authors name would have sold me, but . . .
Yeah, that Freer fellow, when coaching a bunch of us fledgling writers on the Bar did keep saying we needed to know where the end was, so we had something to aim at . . .
Is Storm Dragon the next book in the Dragon’s Ring series? If so, HUZZAH!.
Regardless, get me a copy pre-publication so I can review it.
I have had some books where I did that, though instead of a full plot, it was a list of bullet points that needed to happen by the end.
I have others where I didn’t do that until the murky middle, when my decision tree had so many myriad pathways that I needed help pruning them down.
And then there were the books where I wrote to the end, and then had to go back and edit in all the foreshadowing, and add a scene or two to make sure the reader didn’t have to leap from branch to branch in the decision tree like a squirrel.
I suspect true pantsing is rarer than advertised, and most of us are on the spectrum somewhere.
When I called myself a pantser, I mostly meant that I had an end-point and a few setpieces/candybar scenes, but I didn’t write them down. I’ve done fully improvised stuff a few times in the NaNoNoWriMo years, but I think only a couple of them ever reached a true endpoint.
Oh, yes, starting with the ending does have the danger of being too simple. You have to think yourself back into the characters’ ignorance. . . .
I outline to force the story to cough itself up. If it peters out halfway, it’s better in the outline than in a full draft.
I always try to have an end-goal for my stories. Not so much a firm and fixed “ending,” but I want to know the things I need to accomplish on the way to the last chapter.
For example, in Solist At Large, I had several things I needed my main character to do-
-but to get there, I also had to plan for the next novel, which included things like-
And I also have the joys of “checkpoint writing,” which is my standard. I have a map, I have a destination, I have points along the way I need to hit, but occasionally I’m going to wander off and find myself off the road and might need to get back…
My non-fiction requires hyper-detailed outlines. I suspect that’s why my fiction rebels at outlines, at least on paper, and I have to sketch out scenes and overall plot arc as I go. At the end of the document is a section in brackets with the broad outline of the story. Each chapter or section has a different bracketed bit with plot points and what happens next. Otherwise I write as the spirit/muse/imp/desire for pelf moves me.