An Organized Mess And Some Writing Tips

 At my last Writers Support Group meeting I was given some feedback that I should share some of my writing strategies, so here it goes!

One of the things I learned after publishing my first book was that throughout the process I was a hot mess. I didn’t have an outline, I had bits and pieces of character description and plot ideas spread out across many documents and I couldn’t find anything. So for my second (the next book in the trilogy) I took a lot of time planning.

Here are the things that helped me finish my second novel and will jump start my third:

1) Write your series with your conclusion in mind. 

 Have you ever read a series and felt incredibly lost and at the end of the series been confused? It’s probably because the author thought it would be a great idea to write a series, because that’s the cool thing to do, but didn’t spend a lick of time figuring out where the story was going to go beyond the first book.

If you’re writing a series or trilogy always, always, always have your ending of book 1, 2, and all the books after that in mind including how you’re going to sum up the series. If you don’t know how you’re going to sum up the series from the beginning, you’re going to wind up lost or the ending will wind up being anticlimactic which is such a turnoff. 

2)  Don’t be afraid to use a chart.

 If your story deals with a lot of characters and/or powers, using a chart can help clear things up when you forget or (and this happens more often than you think) you get mixed up and out of nowhere a character who shouldn’t have that power suddenly has that power!

Since my story deals with powers, here’s how I used the chart: 

Now I can go back to this and reference which beings have what. During my editing process I can reference this in case I think there are any errors. 

3)  Make yourself a road map.

No, this doesn’t mean write an exhaustive list of everything that will happen and you must know exactly what your characters will do at all times.

This means make an outline, write bullet points of where you’re going to start, what your climax will be, and how you’re going to end the story. This is important because while you’re characters are leading you through this journey, you need to keep your feet grounded. If not, you’ll find yourself way off track and it’ll be hard to get you back to where you need to be in order to finish the book. Which is the goal, right?

These are just a few of the tips I’ve learned through this journey. What are some of your writing tricks?