As I embark on the start of writing another novel it has struck me as curious that each of the books I have written ahs taken a different path in the pre-writing work.

Now, there are, of course, a lot of similarities, after all I am the author of each of these works and while I evolve and change those changes are not so radical as to turn me from a plotter to a pantser. However there are significant changes to my approach with each and every book. The quest for ‘The Way’ to write a novel never truly finds a whole and unifying answer.

Outline vary a great deal from fairly simple and straight forward affairs of just a few pages to the monster outline that reached 87 double spaced pages which detailed nearly every single scene in the work. I like using act structure to plan and plot my narrative but that too changes from book to book, with some using a three-act format such as you might see in a typical movie to more recently a five-act structure inspired by the plays of William Shakespeare. Often my act structure is nothing more than the key events that define the changing of an act, but I have also crafted spreadsheet tracking each character through the acts showing their relations to not only the changing of the acts but to each other as they approach these key story beats.

Often I will amass a list of characters as I compose an outline, with new characters created and added to my list as I discover them in the process and even that changes. For my most recent work, which isn’t yet to the outlining stage, I ended up creating a visual map of the characters, color-coded for if they were primarily associated with a protagonists or an antagonist and with lines connecting the character that had significant relationships to each other. This exposed a hole in the narrative that required a character that connected to several of my major characters and straddled the divided between protagonists and antagonist.

This all makes a weird kind of sense to me. Each novel is unique, with its own set of characters, themes, and events, and that fact that each requires a unique approach should not be that surprising.