Today I'm doing a Blog Swap with the very cool Misha Gericke from sunny South Africa. She's here on my blog discussing how she deals with plot twists, and I'm over at her blog discussing how I deal with miine. Enjoy!Take it away, Misha.
One of my favorite things about writing is when my characters take over, leading me on a journey beyond what I would have thought possible.
Usually, the plot twists are beyond anything I could have imagined if I’d sat down to plan them. That is why I am a pantser.
Unfortunately, the fact that I am a pantser means that there’s a very real risk that I can lose focus and by extension my grip on what’s happening with my story.
So how do I deal with the rapid changes that come from pantsing? Notebooks are out, because when I’m in the zone of spontaneous creativity, stopping to think about what I wrote isn’t ideal. In that zone, things have to be as instinctive as I can possibly make it.
In other words, it’s pretty much impossible for me to keep track of plot twists. But I am incredibly happy with my WiP drafts. So happy, in fact, that most of my revisions are superficial.
How do I do it?
Simple. As a pantser, I can’t really keep a plan, but I keep one thing constant: The “Final Climax”. I have a scene in my mind and NOTHING is allowed to prevent it from happening. For this to work, I have to take a broad view of it. So things that stay constant about this scene are where it happens, who is in it and that it happens.
The finer points like the motivations, the emotions, the interactions and even the outcome of the scene are allowed to be determined by events before it.
So if a change occurs in my story, I write it, already thinking about how it will be leading the reader to the Final Climax. If it leads me away from it, I find a way to guide it back to where I want it. If my guidance feels contrived, I’ll get rid of that change in the rewrite. But here’s the thing, it rarely happens.
It just works.
Like magic.
So how do you keep track of plot twists and changes?