On Pansters, On Plotters, On Cupid and Vixen…

For the most part, I’m a pantser—meaning, I write by the seat-of-my-pants. With Fit For Love (FFL), it started with the germ of a premise—what would happen if my heroine, a couch potato, found herself trapped at a boot camp for fitness freaks? My second, Stealing Amy (SA), started with: what would happen if my heroine (who’s the victim of identity theft) turned the tables and assumed the thief’s identity in order to lay a trap?

With those thoughts in mind, I started writing.

In FFL, what drove me from chapter to chapter was what I call “writing to the hook.” I figured out a nice cliffhanger then create the scenes that led up to it. For example, in chapter three, just as my heroine realizes she’s landed amid a tribe of gung ho health enthusiasts, Aurora, an 80-year-old woman, knocks on her door and asks if she’s got a cigarette. As I began writing chapter four, I had to figure out who this woman was, what she was doing in the story, and how it would impact the entire plot. At another point, the hero ends up having a teenage daughter who’s into goth. Not planned, not plotted. In fact, the only thing I knew about the story was that my heroine would end up saving her life because of something she’d learned at the resort.

Of the industry professionals (editors and agents) who have seen any or all of FFL, two (an agent and an editor) offered similar criticism: “didn’t keep me riveted to the page.”

Luckily, by the time I got that feedback, I’d taken Donald Maass’ workshop and read his book, Writing The Breakout Novel, so I knew what they were talking about.

So, for Stealing Amy, I took a somewhat different approach. This time, I “plotted” the first third of the book insofar as I constructed a table consisting of the goal, motivation and conflict for each character, scene-by-scene. In essence, I figured this would ensure that each scene was essential to the plot…and, hopefully, that each page would inherently contain “tension.”

The only problem is, after I wrote the first third of the book, I came to a standstill. In fact, I took the entire month of November off to write something else. At the end of the day, it took me over a year to write the damn thing, and I’m still editing.

Ack.

Hence…my attendance at the plotting workshop on Saturday…which I will write about in part two of this post tomorrow (I know…you’re all waiting with baited breath, right?)