E.S. Raye

Hello and welcome back! I hope you all had a great holiday season! But now, alas, it’s time to get back to the grind.

This week, while trying to decide what to write about, I came across the suggested topic “Share how you keep your characters, storylines, etc., organized. Do you use an outline? Notecards? Post-its all over your walls?”

This is perfect for me because (and if you follow me on Threads you may already know this), I never pass up an opportunity to share my outlining process!

For those of you who are readers and not writers so much, when it comes to writing a story, there is something of a spectrum regarding the planning process (or lack thereof). On one end, you have the “Pantsers.” These are the writers who sit down and just start writing, pouring their heart and soul out onto the page without any kind of road map to guide them. They write “by the seat of their pants.”

These writers truly mystify me. How do you make sure you hit the structure points when you need to? How do you ensure your theme is consistent throughout the story? How do you end up with a cohesive story at all? But they do. I have deep respect for this thing that I do not understand.

And the reason I don’t understand Pantsers is because I am at the far end of the planning spectrum; a hardcore “Planner.”

I generally start with a vague idea I want to write about. This is usually a concept of theme, but can sometimes be a character or even a setting.

From there I do detailed character bios. Sometimes this is just their history or backstory, other times I do a sort of interview with the the character (check out helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com for some great character interview tips). Then, depending on the story, I need to flesh out the setting the story will take place. Sometimes this is really basic, like if I’m writing a horror that takes place in a contemporary time and place. Other times this can take longer and be more complicated than creating the characters, like if I’m writing an epic space-western that takes place several hundred years in the future on a station floating in the clouds of a gas giant that mines technobabble from the atmosphere.

On the occasion a theme or concept was not the driving force behind the story, one usually emerges during the character and setting creation process. And once I have all three fairly solid, I move on to my favorite part of the entire writing process: outlining the story.

Which is a super complicated process, which I will share in detail next week! But for those of you who stuck around until the end, here’s a taste of what’s to come:

An example of one of my outlines, this one for Gas Giant Gambit

Drop by next week for Part 2, when I explain how I get to this complicated road map from a theme, a setting, and a few character bios!