: Re: How much planning should go on before beginning writing? I really want to begin my first novel, but I'm just not sure how clear of an outline I should have before I start. Is a detailed

@Vandalay250

Vote Up Vote Down

When I was studying sketch writing, we were taught to not worry about storylines and events, but rather about characters, relationships, and their motivations. The motivations then lead to some conflict and the personalities lead to a resolution.

In sketch (essentially a five minute play that tells a short story), the arc was pretty much, introduce characters, relationships, and environment by 1:00. Build up towards conflict by 2/2:30. The conflict brings out each characters needs and thereby actions, which drives towards a resolution around 4:00, and then wrap up at 5:00.

Following this method, each character would have a reason he does something, and the dialogue would write itself. This holds not just for comedy, but also other types of theatre, and on a larger scale (ie: novel, three-act play) the same concepts hold within each scene.

Every week we had to write a story, and the way we always started was by having some general idea and some characters and their motivations.

The characters then defined what happened. Often time, the end turned out to be entirely different from what was in the back of my head initially.

Stephen King talks about the same thing in On Writing, where when he starts a book he has no idea what's going to happen.

Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park) had also said in an interview many years ago that he used to get into the heads of velociraptors by pretending to be one in his office just so he could understand what they were going to do next.

(0)

Login to post a comment!