Writing Approach

George R. R. Martin once said there are two types of writers, Gardeners and Architects. In his analogy, a story is like a plant that grows organically and has a life of its own.

• A Gardener writes without constraints, allowing the story to weave where it wants by just diving in and putting words on the page.

• An Architect plans out their story, building a trellis to ensure that the story grows in a specific way, meeting specific plot points at particular pacing.

I dialled the Architect approach up to a hundred while writing The World That Was, adding project management techniques and Excel graphs to create the Engineer approach.

Engineers are obsessed with efficiency and NUMBERS!

• Efficiency was achieved by considering the entire plot before diving into prose. Story ideas and character arcs were developed using quick ‘sketches’ that were progressively fleshed out in greater detail. A paragraph about the book idea became two pages of dot-point events. These dot-points were condensed into chapters and then each was expanded with its own 300 word summary. This allowed preliminary plot ideas for the entire novel to be tested with readers before consuming valuable writing time and the sketches meant writing sessions always had a pre-defined beginning and end – expanding 300 words into 2500 for a chapter was much less daunting than starting with a blank page.

• Numbers were used to track progress and maintain motivation. A desired story length was set and divided into aspirational chapter sizes. Actual chapter lengths were noted after each writing session and the time taken was tallied. Equations revealed what percentage had been written, showed how my writing pace changed amongst life’s other demands and estimated completion dates.

All of my planning was done in an Excel spreadsheet which I used to break the writing process into manageable chunks, each able to be completed in an evening or two. The spreadsheet stepped me through my creative process – which I later learned is similar to the Snowflake Method – to ensure that the overall story tied together from the outset, minimising the amount of words and effort that was wasted.

I used formatting and graphs to gamify the process, revealing tangible results after each writing session. This was highly motivating and drove me to complete my novel faster than I ever could’ve imagined.

I turned my spreadsheet into a template that explains each step of the process and gives the entire planning of my own novel – including the 20,000 words of chapter summaries – to show how I completed each step.

Not all of this approach will match the way you write so please feel free to add, subtract and alter both the spreadsheet and the approach to suit whatever works for you.

Please share the spreadsheet with anyone that you feel might benefit from the structured approach or the motivation of keeping track of the writing. I’ve learnt a lot during the editing process so will hopefully add some extra steps when the book is out for submission.

Happy writing!