I always thought I was a plotter. 

When I was at school I used to work through everything very methodically and plan it all out before I ever started a project, but it turns out that was more due to teachers’ expectations than anything to do with how I learned and wrote things. 

It turns out it’s an absolute mess in my head…

I was so excited to write my first manuscript (as yet still unfinished for reasons that will become very clear), I wrote all the fun chapters first. Fight scenes, spicy scenes, death scenes… anything that wanted to come out of my brain I wrote before anything else but that caused me two problems further down the line:

1. I became very attached to those individual scenes and then had to try to join them all together even if logically I knew they were unnecessary or didn’t really fit.
2. The bits in between felt like boring travel explanations or links between scenes and because they were out of the flow I really struggled to make myself write them.  

So this time, with Resurrection and Retribution, my two Runes and Ravens novels, I have tried to have more discipline and to be honest it has worked so well for me, but even now I don’t really plan out exactly what I think will happen or the likely chapter content. 

I have a beginning, something that happens in the middle, and an end, and if that changes while I’m writing it, which almost always happens thanks to my MMCs not behaving or doing what I expect of them, then great, so be it, that becomes a natural, flowing part of the story. 

This approach has really helped with my discipline, and it has helped me stay more in touch with the story and let it evolve more organically. I finished Resurrection in just over six months and I am working on Retribution now, so I’m happy that I’ve found a way of working that suits me. 

I’m not sure if that definitively puts me in one camp or the other, of plotter or pantser, but I think I’d consider myself more of a pantser given how much free reign my characters have over the storyline…

If you have any writing tips I would love to hear them via my get in touch page!

E.x