It is said there are two types of writers: plotters and pantsers. The first type plans their story in advance, chapter by chapter, beat by beat, knowing exactly what should happen and when; then they execute that plan. The second type comes up with an interesting start and then just rolls with it, hoping something good comes out by the end.

I have always been more of a pantser. I actively dislike planning and am unable to get out of bed in the morning if I already know exactly what I am going to do today. I improvise my stories—in fact, I improvise all my projects, games and music as well.

This, however, breaks down when you have a lot of projects, tight deadlines or a tumultuous life. It’s “easy” to come up with logical and interesting new scenes on the spot when that is the only thing you’re thinking about. It’s much harder to improvise a coherent story when you are writing three series in parallel, of which one needs to enter pre-order next week, and you have been ill for weeks now.

You start forgetting crucial properties of your characters. You forget you’ve already written a similar scene a week ago. You can’t come up with an actually cool idea for the next action scene, so it becomes cliché and uninspired drab that borrows heavily from better stories. You fail to bring ideas to their full potential, and block yourself completely due to those doubts.

Over the years, I have discovered one thing that consistently works. For any sort of art, for any type of writer. I have also noticed successful artists and showrunners use this technique too.

Which is why I wanted to write a brief article about it and hopefully help a few struggling artists :)

Guiding Principles

You might call it a “framework” or “system”, but I don’t think it really fits. I like the term “guiding principles”.

So, what are they?

Guiding Principles are a set of arbitrary rules about how a project should develop, which must be followed and cannot be broken.

That’s it. Establish guiding principles at the start of your project, stick to them, and your life will be easier.

For example,

• “Character A will always make the decision that leads to the most fighting.”
• “Every 5 chapters, there is an interlude that happens in the future.”
• “I will never start or end a chapter with dialogue.”
• “Each scene with character B must take place in a different room of the house.”
• “The midpoint of the book is exactly at 100 pages.”

These rules can be arbitrary. They don’t have to make sense, they don’t have be supported by arguments, they don’t need a reason as to why you chose that specific rule.

But you must invent a few of them. Preferably, you want a few guiding principles for all major areas of a project.

Why? Because whenever you are in doubt, whenever you get writer’s block or think you’re taking the wrong path, you can look back on your guiding principles and they will tell you what to do.

So have a few of them about the overall structure. Have a few of them about specifics, such as writing style, how characters act, and how you write about some magical part of your fantasy world. Have a few “meta-principles” about the project itself, not the content. (Such as “I will write 2 chapters each Saturday.”)

Why?

As stated, these help you overcome the biggest enemy of all artists: doubt and indecision.

When in doubt, check your principles. When you can’t make a choice, check your principles.

They allow all the freedom in the world. If you’re not blocked, you don’t need to check them. If you’re in the flow and things are going well, you don’t need to check them. They are there for you when things get tough and you’re in the messy middle of your story.

At the same time, limitations breed creativity. Having a principle you cannot cast aside will often force you to think out of the box. You wanted to write a quick action scene, but now your principle says every action scene must take place at a unique location, so you have to think a little longer. You wanted to add some common mechanic to your game, but it directly goes against a principle, so you have to introduce something more creative.

I regularly come up with guiding principles, usually when I’m doing something entirely different. And I try to assign them to different projects. Each story has a different set of principles, which inherently forces me to write a different story and end up with something more creative.

For example, a principle in one of my series is “the protagonist always gets X, and always at the cost of Y”. (Of course, I know what X and Y are, but I left the specifics out to avoid accidental spoilers.)

How they get it, what form it takes, how the consequences play out—it’s all still for me to decide. I have all the freedom in the world. But when it comes to the overall plot for each book and making decisions, I have this principle to help me out in five seconds.

At the same time, once I established this principle, I had to rewrite some older ideas for later books. I had to find a way to make the principle true, which forced me to come up with a more unique plot and approach. Perhaps the original version followed a standard story formula in which the protagonist overcomes a flaw, but now I have to keep that specific flaw and do something else to create a satisfying ending.

As such, many of my future projects are not lists of ideas, worldbuilding, first chapters, or whatever. They are a list of guiding principles. Sometimes pretty random rules just to see what happens. Sometimes more informed rules that I think will perfectly fit this specific idea.

I used to call these “story bibles” in the past, but I’ve grown out of that term. (It has also confused others with whom I shared ideas or work. Especially those that know my hatred for religion.)

What are the alternatives?

Guiding principles, to me, fall halfway between plotting and pantsing. They are not a detailed structure or plan, but they do create order from chaos or uncertainty. It’s the perfect balance, which is why I think they’re so effective and will suit anyone.

The one alternative is relentless structure. You plan your entire story ahead of time. You create a nice list of what happens and why, then expand that list into prose.

This has never worked for me. In planning the story, I did the work and lost all motivation to actually write it afterwards. In knowing exactly how it ends or what happens, I lost motivation to work on it further.

Furthermore, we cannot see the future. Our minds are feeble, with bad memory and bad logical thinking. If your planning is all on paper, in lists of notes or mental visions, you will miss sooooo many flaws and opportunities. Any plans I ever made for stories had to be thrown out of the window after a few chapters.

We simply cannot reason through all possibilities and see everything … until we actually act. The best way to know what should happen next, is by writing the entire chapter. By spending a few hours actually developing the story, filling in the specifics, and filling your mind with its world.

So, to me, planning a story in detail is just trying to write a story in the worst way possible for us humans. It doesn’t work and it wastes time, purposely picking worse methods. Instead of an hour planning, spend the hour writing, and you have a much stronger idea of where to go next.

When you take that to the extreme, though, you get the other end: complete improvisation. You start with some interesting nugget of story and be on your way. When it works, it works. But it doesn’t always work, does it?

You might run out of cool ideas for the next chapter. You might not realize a major flaw until you’re twenty chapters deep, requiring a ton of rewriting and throwing away beautiful chapters for which you worked really hard. When it gets tough, you have nothing to fall back on and nothing to keep going.

Even worse, if you have deadlines of any sort attached to the project, you will grow increasingly nervous about never being able to meet them. And if life gets in the way, or other projects, your attention will be forced to leave the story. When it comes back, it has nothing to quickly remind itself what you were doing and how to continue.

So yes, I have learned that if you want any consistent, professional output for your art, you can’t just wing it all the time. Shocker. And that’s why a set of guiding principles helps.

A practical example

I write a new cycle for The Saga of Life each year. Ten fantasy “short” stories, mostly based on biology and the history of life on earth. This means I write the stories in-between other projects. I work on another book for a month, then do one short story, then return. This means the project is never done and it just slowly receives more stories.

Do I have a very strict plan for each story, or each cycle, or even the entire saga? No. It’s way too large, its end way too far off in the future, to know anything for certain. And as I stated: if I already knew what story #6 of cycle #10 would be now, I would lack the motivation to actually reach it and write it.

But there are guiding principles. There are things each story must have. Each time period has things that already exist, rules that are always true, and things that just won’t happen or be invented yet.

For example, let’s look at “cycles”. Each cycle has …

• One specific theme. (Example: “Chain of Food”)
• One short story per time period. (Hence, 10 time periods = 10 stories per cycle.)
• As many stories as possible on the same continent. (To keep things connected and streamlined.)
• One of the godchildren who is most prominent and gets more advancement/backstory. (In fact, each story must have one link to the gods.)
• Two stories where I allow myself to pick a really weird structure or approach.
• As much as possible, reuse locations or characters from previous cycles. (This will become more and more true, of course, as the Saga progresses. At the start, we don’t have enough “previous stories” yet to draw from.)

Some of these principles were picked randomly, such as the 10 time periods and one per time period. I picked that rule when I was 11 years old, just after inventing this entire idea.

Some of them were picked after writing stories and finding them to be useful guidelines. Such as the 2 “weird” stories per cycle, which is simply what I felt like doing all the time. And the one about reusing characters, which became apparent when I started to introduce too many new characters each story, eliminating juicy connections and references between them.

But all of them help me quickly structure new stories and make decisions about where we’re headed. When unsure, check the principles.

Should I pick story idea A or B? Well, B has recurring characters from previous stories, so B it is.

Should I add this cool story idea now? No, it doesn’t match this cycle’s theme, so plan it elsewhere.

Will people be confused if I write this story using flashbacks? No, I don’t have two “weird” stories yet this cycle, so it’s fine to do one this time.

Hopefully you can see the power of these. So go and invent some guiding principles for your project, random or not, and stick to them.

A non-writing example

Finally, let’s briefly look at game development. Making (board) games is hard. You have to somehow design the absolute simplest ruleset that will deliver the most fun for whatever kind of people try it.

In any game I’ve made, there are always 20 solutions for every problem. There are endless rules you might add or remove, including tiny tweaks, and you never know which one is the best until you try. (But it’s pretty hard to try 10000 different configurations with different test groups. Infeasible, one might say.)

How do you make decisions? How do you keep moving?

You establish guiding principles and stick to them.

For example,

• “This game will only contain cards and no other material.”
• “This game can’t contain text on the cards, so it’s playable with kids who can’t read yet.”
• “I want this game to feel tense all the time. Always make the decision that creates more interactivity and volatility.”
• “This game can only use three main colors.”
• “The core of this game should be simultaneous, so people don’t need to wait for each other’s turns.”
• “The entire ruleset for this game should fit on a single card.”
• “The material for this game should fit on at most 3 A4 pages when printed.”
• “The game ends when the deck runs out, and the deck may only get smaller, never larger.”

As you see, some rules are pretty random, others more akin to “reasonable project requirements”. All of them are equally valuable, in my experience, and help hone in on some final product much more quickly.

Telling yourself that the “deck may never get larger” eliminates an entire world of possible rules, special abilities and mechanics. I will come up with loads of ideas that sound good in theory, but can be discarded instantly thanks to this principle. Which is good, because then I only have to test the other 3 good ideas I had, instead of 30 of them.

Telling yourself that the game can “only use three colors” eliminates an entire world of different visual styles and designs. Which is good, because then I only need to make 5 sketches for the card design, instead of 50.

As long as you vary these principles and spread them across the major parts of a project, they should never actually limit you or force you to create identical, formulaic projects. Instead, they force you to be creative, while practically making it impossible to slam on the brakes because of doubt or indecision.

Conclusion

This is my brief explanation of guiding principles and why, at least for me, they are the best method. It removes the uncertainty and chaos from having no structure, without throwing you in a cage with relentless (and mostly useless) planning and structure.

As the examples showed, many of them are simply “project requirements” or “identifying your vision”. I still wanted to write this article because many people don’t even do that or don’t know what that is.

So, so many people start projects without identifying what the project even is or what it should be. Entire films and tv shows are made without anybody writing a single page of requirements stating what the project is and isn’t. Which shows in the final work, because unless you’re extremely lucky or skilled, this creates a messy pile of garbage.

Make those your first guiding principles. A set of 5 or 10 general rules about what you are actually doing. “This game is for families to play during holidays, so give it a holiday theme and make it very light on rules”. Or “This story should be accessible fantasy, so keep the number of viewpoint characters to at most 3 and the word count below 100,000”. (I am inventing all of these on the spot, by the way.)

If you don’t know … then figure it out. How can you write a story when you have no clue what you aim to write? If this is really hard for you, just pick something at random. Really, just pick something. Set arbritrary limits and goals, so you get a feeling for how useful that is and whether that is what you intended to do.

When you have that, sprinkle in some more principles that help you decide other things. And a few more to give yourself limitations which, as you know now, breed creativity.

Then you have a nice page you can print and hang next to your screen. Or just a document to open up whenever the going gets tough. And you will never experience writer’s block again :p