In the writing community, I see alot of talk about ‘plotting vs pantsing’. If I remember correctly, these terms came out of the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) community. The titles are pretty self explanatory, but basically it divides us up by how we get our ideas out, whether we plan the story or we just fly by the seat of our pants.
This iteration of discussion is going to be exploring my addition to this: the chunker. The writer who has to jump around their story and write what’s coming out before they ever manage to get something linear. They’re a combination of the other two, adding in their own chaotic twist to this style of writing. Along that vein, I’m also going to provide a bit of advice for what us odd balls can do to help our styles since there aren’t really resources out there designed for us.
What the heck is a Chunker?
I’m going to start this with some blunt honesty: I have never actually been able to fill in a plot outline for my writing. I know there are a whole bunch of different types of plot structure resources out there, but I have yet to find one that I am able to use unless I fill it in after I’ve already written the story.
Half the time, I don’t even know if what I’m writing is going to be an entire story. I usually just get short snippets that I then share or tuck away until there’s more of that piece to add to it. When I wrote Sable’s Journey, I did so by accident.
Yes. You read that correctly.
I didn’t know what the plot structure would look like before I picked up my pen; all I knew was a vague timeline of scattered events, and I only had that after I’d written a small collected of unrelated scenes.
I also didn’t know how many chapters I would have or how many scenes, I didn’t know what my overall word count goal was.
I didn’t know what the inciting event would be or the rising action or even who the bad guy was. Yep, I’ll repeat that: I didn’t know my book’s villain until I had over half of it written.
Technically, Sable’s Journey began with something I still have never actually written.
It started out with the birth of a faceless character that was appearing in my head. She showed up in my mind dressed in armor, and walking down the hall of a beautiful castle. She had two swords strapped to her back, a quiver on her hip, and she was holding her bow in her hand. My first thought when this character started appearing was, “you’re shiny,” the second was, “I need to research archery if I wanna write you.”
Only after doing my archery research did the first actual written scene with Sable begin to play out in my head, and that one later became the beginning of the book. When Sable takes her hood off and reveals her identity is the same moment that I finally got to find out who I was writing about, and I will gladly admit: I got so excited! I called my best friend and was shouting into the phone that it wasn’t a new character at all, it was someone I’d written about before, but now she’s all grown up!
After that, I had a hundred questions I needed to answer because the last time I wrote with her, she was twelve and traveling with a volatile crazy man named Kazious. Now she’s twenty-six, traveling alone, and wielding an arsenal of weapons I did not give to her last time. Holy crap. So, I started furiously writing random scene after random scene, just to figure all of that out, only to have her drop more bomb shells on me that required even more answers to be uncovered!
It wasn’t until I wrote what became the ending of the novel that I actually had enough of a collection to decide this was the birthing ground of a book, and by then I had already written most of the key scenes for her relationship with Gabe during the journey.
I know that I can’t be the only one who writes like this, though. Yes, we’re all unique, and yes, our minds will all create differently. However, there’s still a quality of sameness to the overarching way that our minds function. That’s why there’s so many resources available for planner type minds and pantser type minds. They’re all unique, but they’re still the same enough to find help.
So, here’s some things I’ve figured out for my brain that I’m hoping will be able to help you as well if you’ve made it this far.
A Few Tips For The Weird Ones
- You have to get comfortable with asking yourself a lot of questions. You also have to be comfortable with not knowing some things.
When the other resources didn’t work entirely, I took the pieces that did, then sorted out what they lacked for my brain, and filled in the blanks. I ended up creating a bunch of personalized resources to help me get my stories planned and written! (And I may or may not be working on something cool for all of you out there in the same boat. . .)
These resources for the most part, took on the form of questionnaires. I have character sketches or full questionnaire profiles depending on how much I need to know about them and how important they are to the story. I also have a questionnaire for planning out my different races and creatures. The one thing I haven’t been big on is setting – I make notes of what I do write in case I need to reference it again, but my personal style of writing doesn’t require fleshed out settings beforehand.
Having items that prompt me to question my characters and my universe seemed to be that magic trick that let me get the story out.
Some of these resources have since been repurposed and made into downloadable documents here for you guys! I’m working on more as well, and have a cool surprise coming soon for us weirdos.
- Do you need to know every detail of your story before you can write it?
A question I see frequently. My answer is a little different from what I tend to see in the writing community, so let me reiterate first that this is for the weird ones:
No, you do not need every single detail first. It’s incredibly useful to have as much information as you can before you start, but no it is not a necessity. You just need a place to start. Write what you do know, even if it’s just a sentence. Maybe all you have is the tagline that’ll go on the front cover later. Maybe you have a smattering of random scenes that give you a vague sense of the timeline. Maybe you just have an awesome character that you just really want to torture.
That’s all you need. Start writing what you do know.
The important step after that is to start asking questions about what you need to know.
I had one really big question that I needed to answer for Sable’s Journey even if I didn’t know anything else. Where was Kazious? That was my one key mystery that I needed to solve.
- Don’t leave it disconnected
No matter how you string your story together or how many small pieces were disjointed in the beginning, this is crucial before you finish: It cannot be obvious to our readers that we didn’t know what we were doing. When you decide (or more accurately, your characters decide) to suddenly do something absolutely crazy – and you hadn’t planned that craziness out at all – you do have to make sure it isn’t obvious to the reader that even you were caught off guard too. It’s our job as the writer to go back and smooth out the transitions and put in the foreshadows and make it intentional.
You will not be able to tell how chunky my book was in the beginning (I hope). I went back after I finally got the whole linear story written, and I combed through it so that all the unplanned pieces that basically wrote themselves were just as connected to the whole of the story as the parts I did plan. I actually had colored tabs that I put into my manuscript to indicate things that I needed to mention earlier. They were things that had to be foreshadowed or hinted at or even just flat out mentioned sooner.
- Plot Twist
In addition to the last point, I quickly want to touch on how we handle plot twists. I have one with my book and it was a sneaky one. I vaguely knew that something had to happen in order to cause a separation of sorts, but I didn’t know what that would be… Until I started writing it. Then I sat there with the pen scratching paper and muttering, “oh no… OH… NO… why dude? Why?”
The problem, though, was that I realized quickly that I didn’t have my characters set up in a way to tell the reader that this was something that could happen. I knew it was fully in character, but I had to take this event and walk backwards through my manuscript multiple times to smooth out the connections leading up to it. Your readers should have a fighting chance to know that something can happen, even if you’re not fully telling them it’s going to happen. Adding the appropriate hints can make the difference between readers feeling betrayed by the author, or enjoying the fall as your characters drag the reader down to your story’s rock bottom.
I wanted to tackle this subject because I know a lot of writers that think they’re alone or doing something wrong when they struggle to uphold the plans and structures that the majority of fellow writers talk about. We all create our fictional worlds in a unique fashion that is specific to us as individuals, and you as a writer should not ever feel forced to create inside someone else’s box.
So, to my dear friends and fellow writers that are a little bit weird: you’re okay. You’re not doing it wrong. We just have a different process and thus, have to follow some different guidelines. If you took nothing else from this piece, please remember this: make it look intentional by the end. That’s all you need. Your story can start out as messy as you need it to be, just make sure that the end result is fully connected.
I am currently designing a workbook to help chaotic writers like us with our stories, and in the meantime, I’m developing individual resources you’ll be able to find in this site to help you along.
Check out, and keep checking back into the resources page for downloadable questionnaires if you need some extra help with your world! Keep an eye out on the shop as well, as I’m working on services I can offer to help fellow chaotic writers.
If you have any further thoughts on this topic, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Feel free to add any other tips/tricks/guidelines you may follow for your own work.