Plotting Your Course

Plotting Your Course

March 4, 2026

2–3 minutes

Twenty years ago or so, I’d have confidently told you that you should carefully plot your novel. In fact my outlines were often half the size of novel, needing only dialogue and location details inserted.

I’d have supported my thought with things such as “If you don’t plot, how can you know where you’re going?” and “Would you set out on a journey if you didn’t have a map?” And “It will be far more work to have to backtrack through all the times you went wrong” and–

And then I found myself unable to plot a novel. One specific novel. Instead, I had a series of high points to tack by and just wrote towards those points. And then there was the novel that wouldn’t let me plot it AT ALL. I didn’t even have the high points.

Add to that that it dictated itself in two weeks, so every morning I got up and it wanted to be written, and I had no idea what I was writing. It revealed itslef a page at the time. It is also my most tightly plotted novel.

So? What does all that mean?

Novels and writers are individual. If someone tells you there is one true way to write a novel, they are wrong. Their one true way MIGHT be the way that works with your mind. On the other hand, it might not. And you shouldn’t feel in the slightest upset if it doesn’t.

I swear there are as many ways of writing as there are writers. Some people write novels in pieces and all out of order. It would drive me completely batty.

But my writing has changed so much through time, that I can’t swear that won’t be my method in three or four years.

All I can do is face each novel as it comes.

Be assured that the method by which you write will not at all make it good, bad, purple or pokadot. The most important thing is to make sure it leaves your desk finished. And that you don’t overdo it.

Three passes, the final one being for wording should be enough. (This is what I’m doing on Witch’s Daughter now. it should be release mid-April. Yes, this IS the year of finishing everything.)

The point is that from the other side no one can see if you wrote it without a plot or upside down or in bits or whatever. Provided the final product holds up.

So don’t worry about your process. Worry about the finished product.

8 responses to “Plotting Your Course”

jaglionpress

March 4, 2026 at 8:04 am

I agree, with the one caveat that sometimes learning about how other people’s processes work can useful when you’re either just starting out or finding that your current process has stopped working for you.

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1. Sarah A. Hoyt
  
  March 4, 2026 at 12:30 pm
  
  yes, of course. BUT you should treat it as a suggestion not THE formula.
  
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Pam Uphoff

March 4, 2026 at 8:37 am

Yeah. What she said. And now I’ve got a &%$# series that thinks it needs to be plotted! All of them. At the same time!

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The Phantom

March 4, 2026 at 10:04 am

“So? What does all that mean?”

That we might be a little crazy? ~:D [running away laughing]

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1. crossovercreativechaos
  
  March 4, 2026 at 11:51 am
  
  *Looks shifty* Define “little”. 😉
  
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TXRed

March 4, 2026 at 10:28 am

I’ve written detailed plot outlines for two novels. One had the characters blow the outline to shreds as they raced off in their own directions. The other worked better, but isn’t as popular with readers (it reads “stiff” to me now. Daughter of the Pearl, for those wondering.)

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The Phantom

March 4, 2026 at 10:58 am

But on the other hand…

“The point is that from the other side no one can see if you wrote it without a plot or upside down or in bits or whatever.”

Don’t know if I agree. So many people writing to The Checklist. I don’t even go to the bookstore anymore, because it makes me angry. I stand there in the SF section, shrunk to a 10th its former size, and blurb after blurb they’re all the same, spinach. Books are supposed to be fun, right? Spinach is not fun.

Plotting in the Modern World seems to include events dictated by The Plot!, characters making choices that no sane being would ever make because The Plot!, characters being these 2D paper cutouts that bend and twist to The Plot! regardless of what’s come before in the narrative, etc.

A young Conan the Barbarian wears a dress to prom at Heroes High to show solidarity with his bros because The Plot. It’s just aggravating.

My way of doing it is completely wrong of course. I have some people who I turn loose to go save the world, or save each other, or maybe just walk around in Valhalla and make fun of the Einherjar. (Drinking, wenching and fighting is a weekend, not a career, and certainly not Eternity. What a bunch of losers.)

Completely wrong, but I prefer it to some editor yelling ‘put a chick in it and make her gay!’ Don’t get me started on television (oh my ghod, who writes that crap, they can’t even spell ‘continuity’…)

Thus I highly encourage all of y’all out there to just freaking write something, even if it’s stupid, even if you don’t know who these people are or where this is all going.

It’s a road trip. A Lincoln Continental, a full tank of gas, no map, and you are not driving. You’re in the back seat taking video with your phone.

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Frank

March 4, 2026 at 11:03 am

Well said Sarah! I’m still finding my process on my second novel. What I call my first novel is one saga but over a 40 year period with multiple different characters over the years and was written over many years as short (and not so short) stories. I read Save the Cat Writes a Novel, and found it much too prescriptive, but it still gave me at least one valuable insight that I’m using. I know how to write stories, but I’m still feeling my way around at novel writing.

Oh BTW, I love when a typo or maybe just a misspelling sparks my imagination. “Pokadot” instead of polkadot actually sounds like much more fun since I was never any good at the polka anyway. The name supposedly arose because the pattern became popular at the same time as the dance, but otherwise had nothing to do with the dance.

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