Over the past few years, my writing process has begun to gel into an approach that I’ve never seen previously discussed or debated. It’s an end-to-end perspective of what it takes to write a long-form work like a novel, informed both by my years of (thus far unsuccessful) writing and my (rather more successful) years as an engineer and product manager in tech. It takes a highly opinionated view of the subject in order to address what I see as the most fundamental problem for an author who is otherwise a talented writer: long-form writing is hard, it’s daunting, it’s lonely and frustrating, and all these symptoms only get worse the further into the novel you go.

This is the first part in a series on Plotter-Oriented writing. Note that I’ve brazenly retconned the term “Process-Oriented” to “Plotter-Oriented” to more accurately express the principle.

---

Let’s open with an admission: everything I’m about to tell you is a lie.

It’s not that I mean to lie to anyone, but the inescapable truth is that I can’t prove any of what I’m about to discuss. As I mentioned, I lack notable writing credits to back this up. I believe it to be true and that’s why I’m sharing it with you. But under the rules of evidence introduced by me right here on this blog, anything that can’t be proven, anything that lacks substantiation, foundation, and data can’t be true. Since I lack such evidence, I’m urging you to treat me as a liar. This may not work for you. It may not even work for me!

The one thing I’ll say in my defense is that I’m in the process of using this method and it feels right. I actually have a tiny amount of empirical evidence based on my very much work-in-progress novel. I’m experimenting on myself and sharing that experiment with you.

So we’re good with that? Right. Moving on.

---

I’m going to assume for the purpose of this blog series that you’re a great writer. Word choice is your jam. Sentences flow from the tips of your fingers as easily as crystal waters gushing from a mountain spring. I’m not here to suggest anything to make anyone a better writer at the microscopic level. With regards to the business of grammar, characterization, believable dialog, and even scene pacing, I’ll remain silent.

Instead, I want to focus on the macroscopic. Let’s direct that magical flow into a river with a single goal: put the story in your head onto the page. Completely. And with the assurance that you’ve done your absolute best.

I come from an engineering and product management background. In both these disciplines, we’re principally concerned with shipping product. Nothing – however clever – is useful to our customers unless it gets out the door, so we’ve spent many decades refining the methods by which our products make that journey. It struck me recently that some of these practices solve problems directly analogous to the problems faced by a writer producing a novel. So the philosophy which follows – while admittedly untested in the domain of writing – does not appear out of nowhere. Much of what I’ll discuss in this post and the posts which follow extends directly out of time-honored practices; they just happen to be practices from other domains. In fact, a lawyer friend of mine was astonished to hear that books aren’t routinely written this way. In his world, legal briefs are generally created using a similar process.

One last caveat before I dive in: I’m claiming a certain novelty to the notion I’m about to propose. I might be mistaken. I’ve not spent my career in the writing business. Maybe everyone “in the know” already writes this way and I just missed it somehow. But I’ve read a lot of writing books, taken classes, and thought about how to approach and solve these problems as an amateur for most of my life…and all I can say is that I’ve never encountered a discussion of this specific set of ideas, let alone with a specific proposed solution.

I’ve given this philosophy two names, each of which resonates for a particular reason: Extreme Plotting and Plotter-Oriented Writing. Let’s unpack these one at a time.

Extreme Plotting

I believe that most modern writers are familiar with the division between plotters vs. pantsers. The plotter tends to spend a lot of energy working out their story in advance while the pantser has an idea and just dives into it (i.e., they write “by the seat of their pants”).

Now, if you’re a die-hard pantser, then I guarantee you my approach is no good for you. You may as well close this page now because you’re not gonna like where I’m going. (And by the way, good for you! I’ve no intention of fixing what ain’t broke.) You can probably guess from the name: Extreme Plotting means that we’re going to turn the plotting dial up to 11. We’re going to get brutal about what you do and in what order you do it. My hypothesis is that we can address almost all of those hardest-to-solve symptoms with this approach.

You’ll understand why I believe this by the end of this post.

Plotter-Oriented Writing

While the term Extreme Plotting has a pithy ring to it – and explains qualitatively where we stand on a particular spectrum – it doesn’t really express how we’re going to get past the nasty writing monsters that lurk under the bed. Which is why I’ve cheated and given us two names to work with. But it’s a term that speaks to the engineer in me rather more than the writer…so I’m hedging just a bit.

Plotter-Orientation is something I’ve carjacked from my time in the world of programming. Programming is replete with “orientations” to how you code: Object-Oriented coding, Aspect-Oriented coding, Data-Oriented coding, etc. Each orientation helps a programmer write better code, either because it assists reasoning, facilitates testing, or otherwise produces a better, more performant product. And each orientation carries a strong opinion about why coding this way solves a given set of problems.

Data-orientation, for example, focuses on how a computer best consumes data. Data-oriented programming emphasizes code that runs very quickly and efficiently by forcing the programmer to think the way a computer thinks. Object-orientation is nearly the opposite: it emphasizes a coding style that is easy for humans to think about. Which orientation you use depends on your goals: data-orientation will produce faster code (good for fast-moving games, where performance is critical); object-orientation makes code simple to explain, to think about, and to test (good for business applications, where reliability is usually more important than speed).

Plotter-oriented writing suggests that rigorous adherence to a defined set of steps, in order, will make you a more productive, confident writer. In fact, I propose that plotter-orientation will help you (or at least me) reason better about the book, test the story to strengthen it, and ultimately produce a better end product faster than might otherwise be hoped.

In suggesting this plotter-oriented mindset, I’m offering an answer to the how of better long-form writing: lean into a well-defined process. That process is a map which I believe leads with extreme clarity and certainty to where we all want to head: a finished book.

The Extreme Plotter hypothesis

I propose the following:

Writing is work-intensive and time-consuming, and it gets substantially, progressively harder when we lack a clear understanding of our path and destination. Therefore, we will at every stage optimize around drawing and refining our map before we set off. We will complete each stage, in order, before proceeding to the next. By the time we’re deep into the journey we will have a high degree of confidence in our direction and destination.

We will at every stage optimize around drawing and refining our map before we set off. We will complete each stage, in order, before proceeding to the next.

The core of the Extreme Plotter proposal

As I’ve said, this is an extreme approach to plotting. We’re going to hurl ourselves bodily at the hard bits early (while we’re still in the first flushes of inspiration) and defer the fun business of crafting beautiful language until later. And we’ll solve big problems from the get-go when they are (relatively) easily fixed, rather than later when fixing them will require the herculean effort of a rewrite. Better still, because we’ll have addressed the stumbling blocks that interrupt the flow of those sweet words, we can expect our writing velocity to be much, much higher; and our frustration as we approach our goal to be much, much lower.

Of course, nothing I’m suggesting guarantees success. How good a writer are you? How disciplined and persistent? How lucky? All of these necessarily play a factor. All I’m proposing is a better way to travel your Hero’s Journey so that you’ll get to Mordor. Throwing the ring into the Pit of Doom is your job.

The Map

OK, I’ve baited you long enough. Let’s get to this map I keep talking about. Here are the steps I’m using, in order. I’ll expand on each one in its own post at some point in the future.

Inspiration

I’ll write a tiny bit on this step, as it’s the one I have the least to comment on. Still, no one can deny that it’s the start of the writing process.

Prototype

This comes straight from engineering: when you want to build something big, start by building a quick proof-of-concept. Take your idea out for a spin and test the handling before you set off on your journey. Share it with friends…will they ride shotgun?

The End

Going on a journey? Start by knowing where you’re headed.

Research

This is the one step I believe you can (and must) do out-of-order. Research might involve any number of activities (reading, field trips, personal experience, doodling, etc.), and will be a bigger or smaller task depending on what you’re writing, how well immersed you are in the material, and other factors. It’s a process that might start even before your inspiration and keep going well after you’re “done”.

Part of your research might involve creating a “bible”, which would be equivalent to a design document in the engineering world.

Anchor Beats

Using the story-telling model of your choice (I like Save the Cat and will reference it) make decisions on the five crucial beats that define any story.

Story Beats

Fill in the rest of your story beats, ensuring that you’ve got a strong tale to tell. This is a multi-step process which for me includes storyboarding, followed by completing the Key Beats of the Save the Cat structure (I have so far posted an article on Opening and Final Images, and will add links here as I fill in the rest), and finally filling in the remaining major story beats.

Synopsis

Where the rubber meets the road: tell your story in 500 words! But for the writing itself, this may be the most important step in the process, because it’s where story translates into drama: a document you’ll show to a test audience and refine into something readers want to read.

Breaking chapters

Confident in the 30,000-foot map, let’s zoom in and observe the exits, entrances, traffic conditions, and roadblocks. Take everything you’ve done so far and break it down into exactly what happens, scene-by-scene, chapter-by-chapter.

Note that a “chapter” in this sense is a little different from what ends up as a chapter in your finished book. I’ll explain that when I present this section.

Chapter summary

Once again, we’ll show our work by writing a synopsis per chapter and presenting it to our test audience. With this relatively short document, they’ll help us understand if we have a page turner or a snooze fest. From an engineering perspective, this might be considered the equivalent of a “vertical slice”: our entire product expressed thoroughly, but not completely.

And, now, finally, write!

Even in the short space of this blog post, you’re probably exhausted by how long its taken to get here. I don’t blame you. Will this process really get me more certainly to a finished product? Will that product be any better that it would otherwise have been? As I admitted upfront, I can’t say for sure.

But consider all we’ve done, even in this short description: we’ve started with an idea, tested it with a quick iteration to see if it’ll last the journey, then methodically refined our plan until we have something that we know has appeal, at least among a test audience. We’ve found and solved all the plot problems early on, while the inspiration and enthusiasm of the project is still fresh for us. When we start writing, the words should flow more easily because all we’re doing is crafting, filling in what we’ve planned, rather than constantly inventing both story and editorial in every word, sentence, and paragraph.

There are steps beyond this, of course, such as story editing and copy editing. I have little to say on these and therefore won’t write posts on them. They should be relatively unaffected. But I’ll say here, briefly, that if you’ve followed the steps successfully the scale of story editing should be vastly smaller than you may expect or be used to. This is because the story problems were all ironed out in the earliest steps. If the synopsis was good – if the spine of your story was straight – and if the chapter summary was engaging, then (assuming your ability to add the necessary beautiful language, pacing, characterizations, etc) you should have a worthwhile tale to tell.

The Future

In future blog posts I’ll dive into each of the steps outlined above. But always keep in mind the core of the hypothesis: each step happens in order (with the one above-noted exception about research). We plot and plot and plot and don’t move to the next step until we’re confident that we’ve really nailed the one we’re on. As we resolve each step in the process, we increase our confidence that what we’re going to write is what we intend to write, and that we’re not going to find ourselves banging our heads against the keyboard because we don’t know where this story is heading.

Finally for now, let’s not pretend that this is all that revolutionary or revelatory. As I commented above, I can vouch for this process insofar as it resembles my approach to product development. I’ve simply aligned and distilled a number of well-known patterns in writing, engineering, product management, and other disciplines into a singular, overarching philosophy. It’s more of an observation than an insight, and I can see how it’s working for me. In sharing this, my hope is that others see the same pattern and find it helpful.

---

If you’re interested in my observations and insights about writing, in my word game Rootl, in my photo essays, or in following the development of my novel, please consider subscribing to my blog.