This is just a very brief article about something I recently discovered.
I was writing two (short-medium) stories simultaneously. Both of them had some form of outline until the end, as I usually do.
One of the project had great momentum in the story. I felt like there was a clear goal for the character, a clear sequence of events that needed to happen and that was interesting, and it just flowed well.
The other project lacked this, or so I felt. It was a bit more wishy-washy, its direction unclear, the goals of the protagonists perhaps not as strong.
Surprisingly, however, I felt very motivated to work on the story that was lacking and not motivated at all to work on the other one.
The struggling story received 2 or 3 chapters every day. But then a few days later, when switching to the other project, I didn’t even feel like writing a single paragraph. I had the same amount of energy, the same workplace, the same amount of work to be done—nothing else had changed, as far as I could tell.
But the story that struggled and was muddy progressed nicely, and the story that had great momentum and stakes did not.
Why?
I am an improviser at heart. I don’t want to outline my stories or have too much structure, which is why I settled on this balanced approach after all these years. I write down some broad strokes, I plan 4 or 5 chapters ahead of the current one, but not much more.
As such, the story that was going well and had a strong plan until the end felt … boring to me. No more creative decisions. Nothing more to determine, just a grocery list of things to expand into paragraphs.
In the other story, only a fraction of each chapter was already determined. Everything else was still up for grabs, asking me to be creative and make interesting decisions whenever I tried to execute that vague idea.
And so it was that I realized that this is the trick.
If you’re an improviser like me, and you hate planning / structure / knowing what your future holds, this is the balance you can create for yourself.
- Plan/outline just enough to make sure you stay productive each day and the story actually gets finished.
- But do it in such a way that you always leave one thing undecided per chapter or scene.
Maybe you’re already certain that the protagonist will escape prison, but you’re not sure if their cell buddy will make it out too.
Maybe you’re already certain that your hero will have to sail into a storm, but you’re not sure yet if they will make it out of that storm.
Maybe you’re already certain that character A and B will end up together, but you’re not sure when.
Have some semblance of a plan to give you deadlines and keep your process streamlined. (As they say: “restrictions breed creativity”. Complete improvisation is bound to become a mess that you never finish.) But, on purpose, leave (at least) one interesting thing undecided for each writing session you do.
This was a great habit to implement for me. It gave me more motivation for every single day of writing, no matter how well the story was going or how detailed my outline was. There is always a moment of creativity, inspiration and improvisation this way.
It also turned out to be a great marker for whether your story was interesting enough in general. If I couldn’t pick one “interesting” thing about the next scene and leave it blank for tomorrow … then the entire scene isn’t that interesting, right? If I try to be creative, but my outline still remains a grocery list of things that just have to happen (to make the story work), then I know it is predictable and I need to change it anyway. If needed, I might actually erase part of the current plan that had been set in stone for weeks.
That’s … that’s the tip. That’s an organic way I’ve found to stay creative and keep yourself motivated/surprised/inspired even while dealing with outlines, deadlines, and more structure.
Keep reading and writing,
Tiamo