This post is not just for writers, it’s for every creative person out there or anyone just curious about the stories behind my stories.
You might have already come across this debate: Is it better to plan your novel or to wing it? Once upon a time I held a firm opinion in one direction, but then something surprising happened. And it led to a whole new way of seeing things – a different solution that I had never heard of before.
Once upon a time, I saw only problems with being a Pantser. Pantsers are those who write ‘by the seat of their pants’. They sit down every day to discover what happens next. I knew that it was possible to pull off a book by just following where the river led, but I also thought few people did it well. I also thought it ONLY worked for single books, never a series of books, (the exception being a series of books where each book is its own complete story even if the characters are reused). And it worked best for certain genres and was a disaster for others, especially fantasy. I saw so many books published that I could tell, TELL, were not planned and were in trouble, especially if they were a series. I could just sense the author had no idea where he or she was going with the series and did not know how to wrap it up.
One series in particular, I could tell by about book four that this was not planned and every new mystery and hook and surprise was digging the author deeper into a hole she could not climb out of. I put the books down. Sure enough, the author did not finish the series but went on to write other things instead. And that was over thirty years ago. As far as I know, she goes back to the series every now and then but the books are becoming more and more tangled and problematic and readers are really starting to wonder and worry and sense the mess for themselves.
I could also tell books, single books even, that weren’t planned because they were shallower. The plots didn’t have depth, the characters were not vivid and real, and the ending wasn’t foreshadowed and pre-planned. It just was. Those books were like waggling your toes in the water on a baking hot day when what you really wanted was a swim. They did not satisfy you and left you wondering why you bothered.
So I encouraged everyone to plan, plan, plan. And I practised what I preached with my first three published novels.
And then three things happened.
The ‘didn’t-see-it-coming’ book:
When I wrote Sacrifice, it was a standalone. Done. Dusted. But the characters’ voices would not be silenced. They kept talking to me. Normally if a book is done, the characters pipe down. This time, they did not. So I wondered … was there another story there? If there was, it had to be intertwined with the plot of Book One somehow, not be just a nice, separate story involving all the favourite characters. Either it was pointedly connected, or I wouldn’t write it.
So I sat down to the book and put down on cards everything that could be expanded about Sacrifice; everything not fully explained or any item that could be taken further. When I wrote it all down and looked at the collection of cards, I was stunned. It all connected with an almost mathematical precision and pointed in a very clear straight line to an ending I had not seen coming. This was not brilliant planning on my behalf. This was God planning a second book I hadn’t envisioned. And you would swear that Book Two was planned brilliantly before Book One was even written – that the whole story was there all along in my head. It wasn’t. But once I knew Book Two was there, I knew that God had been slipping in items into Book One ready for Book Two. I listened and I planned Book Two entirely with God’s guidance. And without doubt it is the best book (to my mind) that I have ever written.
Though it was an unplanned sequel, the book itself still went through my ultimate planning process. But God was not done teaching me.
That leads me to the second thing that happened.
The ‘great-big-wrestle’ book:
I got to the fourth book that I had meticulously planned and I went to write it. In fact, I finished it, and I could tell it was all totally and utterly wrong. Reading it and thinking about it felt ‘icky’, like reading old angsty high school journals and cringing at how you used to be. Something about it was truly off track, except for one chapter. So I pulled that chapter out. I then started again, rewrote, slotting that chapter in. And the same thing happened. I hated what I wrote. It was all wrong. Except for that original chapter and one extra bit.
I’m talking here about Bloodline: Covenant. I didn’t write that book so much as drag that book into being. I literally rewrote it, start to finish, about thirty times. And then after one final reasonable draft, I reworked, reworked, reworked, adding, changing, rearranging, adding some more, mentally wrestling it into shape twenty, thirty, even forty times. The thing is, that book knew what it wanted to be and I didn’t. But I didn’t have the patience to wait and to listen. I had planned it, therefore the writing would flow freely like it always had. Except it didn’t. And I relied totally on my procedure and my bag of tricks, and not on God.
In the end, I realised that God was teaching me not to rely on my expertise and my craft. I had to listen. And if that meant waiting months and months or years to be ready to write, that’s what I should have done. At the time this began, my son was a newborn, and the issue continued through to when he was about five years old. I was not meant to be writing. God wanted me to invest in motherhood. But I was stubborn and determined to write. Not because I had decided to disobey God, but because I misread it all. I thought I just had to conquer this new obstacle. I was so fixated on writing that I couldn’t imagine there being a season of life I wasn’t meant to write. So I wrestled my way through those years. And though God was gracious and gave me Covenant in little bits until it fitted into that stunning God-planned whole, I could have saved myself a lot of pain.
Listen, yes. I was ready to listen, but what that led to was the entirely, unexpected, blow-me-away third thing that is still blowing me away today.
The ‘What-happens-next, God?’ book:
The very first fantasy novel for adults that I ever wrote – the first of a trilogy – was a big, childish mess. This was before God stepped in and gave me a God-led education on how to write (which I’ve written a post about).
I left that novel in the dustbin of my mind where it belonged. But after writing, or sort of writing Bloodline: Covenant, finishing up my two series of two books each, the idea for that first fantasy novel kept haunting me. What if I used all of my new understanding of what made a good book, and reworked it? This was over ten years later and I was very much detached from that original, so it didn’t feel like the big weighty burden of rewriting. It felt more like thinking about a brand-new story.
I realised that my original idea was a simple one that I had padded out into three books. So this time, what if I thickened the plot and made it two books instead. I already knew the beginning, I knew the ending, and I knew some of what happened in between because I would take what I’d written from that first book and turn them into better scenes.
So I sat down to revise the characters and realised that the original characters were not the original characters at all. At this point, I was starting to recognise God’s voice. So I listened. And I wrote sketches for each of these new characters, giving them all new names.
And then I went to plan and I couldn’t. It was just too big for me. Something was brewing in my brain that was beyond my ability to plan. So I started with what I thought was the logical place: rewriting the first book and then I would plan the second after that.
So I started with Chapter One, but something took over …
Things started to pop into the story that I had not planned: hints and ideas and a depth of plot I hadn’t anticipated, and this was just Chapter One. It didn’t usually happen like this. I realised that God had more in mind than I did, and so I did something I don’t normally do. I threw out the plan and said instead, “What happens next, God?” And I listened. And I wrote.
After every bit I was sure of, I would say, “What happens next?” And when the next idea blazed into my brain as clearly as if I just read it off my plan, I wrote some more. And a book started to emerge that was far beyond my ability to plot. I started to write a book I vowed I would never write: one with many, many main characters and many divergent plot lines that were all interweaving into something I hadn’t anticipated and didn’t even understand myself.
There were times when I would be shocked by what was supposed to happened next: “Are you sure, God? Really?” Or shocked by a character he would introduce, especially if that character didn’t seem to fit with the idea of a “Christian” fantasy. “Are you sure, God?”
I did the next thing, and the next. I have now finished the first draft of that six-book series. Yes, six whole books. I knew better than to bring out/publish any that had been somewhat finished until I got to the end of the whole series, so the books still sit in my computer. But the plot twists, the character paths, the developments, the interweaving and the converging and diverging, are beyond anything I had in mind. And it is all working. I can feel there is nothing random about it. Now that I am at the end, I know beyond doubt it is not random at all. There are a characters there I never planned who were integral to the plot but I didn’t see it until book four or five, or even six. I am telling you this beyond any doubt:
I did not plan that book, God did! And as I edit these six books ready for release next year, I am still blown away by the scope and message of it.
And I realise now that there is a third option to plotting your book that no one ever mentions:
Pantsers, Planners and Pray-ers
If you’re reading this and you’re a writer, then whether you’re a Pantser, a Planner, or both, be also and predominantly a pray-er. That actually goes for ANY creative career. What I mean quite simply is: Ask Daddy God to help. Ask him like you’d ask a friend, or a boss, or a colleague – because he is literally all of those things. I didn’t spend hours in pious prayer on my knees to write my six-book series. I merely sat at my desk, fingers on the keyboard, ready to type, and said simply, “What happens next?”
Even if you are just writing as a hobby, or no matter what your hobby is, ask Jesus to create with you. Just say, “Let’s create together today.” Or “Want to write/create/draw/plan/paint/make music with me?” It’s not about earth-shattering, world-altering creativity that will change millions of lives. It’s about experiencing the deepening of your relationship and creativity when you do it with someone who loves to create even more than you do, who cares about your creativity and art and writing and music and imagination and play more than you ever will, and who can do any of it much better than you can.
If you plan to be a Pantser – in any creative career you have – do it in partnership with the Holy Spirit. Let him lead you. Your subconscious is clever and God-made, but it cannot take you to the heights of creativity that God-led creativity can.
And if you plan to be a Planner, do it in partnership with the Holy Spirit. All the planning in the world won’t help you if you are planning the wrong thing. Again, let him lead you. Ask him to guide you at every step of the creative process. Let him lead you through thoughts, dreams, past ideas, whispers, “coincidences”, conversations with others, what-if exercises, or whatever it is he chooses to use.
And even after you have meticulously planned the creative task, and now you are in the middle of it, if he has something else in mind, let him tell you. Be willing to give it all up and chase whatever he wants for you … even if that means putting down the task for a few years and investing in something else.
You won’t lose yourself when you join with him; you will find a version of yourself that is superior to anything you could imagine. He wants to do things with us and through us and it’s going to elevate your skill levels beyond belief if you will only join with him and be willing to say, “What now, God? And what next?”
About the Author: Lisa Saul
