Thomas Mauser

Authoring a novel, as any writer will tell you, demands time, patience, discipline, creativity, and energy.

While these demands are fundamental in the life of every writer, you, the author, must first determine how you mean to create or ‘build’ your novel. Will you plan your novel to a greater or lesser degree of detail, or will you simply allow your writerly juices to creatively flow and discover your novel as you write?

Examples of writers’ habits that support both sides of this on-going writers’ debate abound.

Agatha Christie, the best-selling novelist of all time, meticulously planned each of her novels, and her notebooks are a testament to her writerly attention to detail.

Lee Child, author of the popular and highly regarded Jack Reacher novels, never plans his novels, relying instead on discovering each novel as he writes it.

E. L. Doctorow, author of works such as The March and Billy Bathgate, once commented that, “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Both approaches have their strengths as well as their weaknesses. It behooves every writer to be aware of them before they reach the proverbial writer’s crossroads and have to choose one road or the other.

Plan to Write:

1. Prevents the writer from encountering the proverbial “writer’s block” – it lays out a roadmap or a blueprint for the writer to follow as he or she authors a novel.
2. Aids the writer in identifying plot holes, inconsistent character development, and structural issues before he or she begins to write.
3. Helps the writer to keep the story on track, rather than having the writer fill the novel with un-needed scenes and / or characters.
4. Stifles the writer’s creativity – characters are predictable or one-dimensional, and the plot is formulaic, lacking genuine surprises or twists in the tale.
5. The writing itself can become over-planned, mechanical, even hollow, with no ‘life’ or energy to engage and keep the reader’s attention.

Discover to Write:

1. Allows the writer to be more creative – inspires them to create unique plot twists and engaging character development without any constraints.
2. Characters are allowed to take on a life of their own – let them be fully two-dimensional.
3. Writing is flexible and adaptive – scenes, dialogue, and characters can appear organically as the writing unfolds in real time, rather than slavishly adhering to a detailed outline or “scaffolding.”
4. Plot holes, structural issues, or weak / inconsistent character development can occur and not be discovered until late in the “discovery writing” process.
5. “Writer’s block” can happen – the writing drifts, the story loses focus, and it wanders down meaningless or dead-end paths, leaving the writer at a dead end.

What is the best approach for a writer to take? Perhaps a hybrid approach might work best for both temperaments. To use a sports example, an ice hockey coach plans out his system – how his team will play at both ends of the ice rink and in every situation – while still allowing the individual players to creatively play to their strengths. Simply put, build an elementary outline that identifies the start and end of the novel, and its major characters, and then simply let the writing journey evolve organically.