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Hi,
You have just made your first positive decision towards becoming a good writer.
It is important before you start writing to decide what it is you are going to write about. It is essential to have a plot and a theme. What I mean by that is, what your characters are going to be doing and how they are going to go about doing it in your story? You need to create all your characters in advance. Give them names, histories etc. Your story has to be structured if it is to make sense, with a beginning, middle, and an ending. If you don't structure then your story will not follow the pattern you want. Your story will be sidetracked by circumstances that arise as you write and that is not what you want to happen. So to stay in charge of your story you need to plan it. Writing by the seat of your pants is, once you have a plan in place, just fine. Write without a plan and it will never work.
If I can be of any further help you know where I am.
Regards Rowland
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I often come up with a plot while carrying out my everyday life. This results in my excitement over the different or interesting perspective. If I´m outside or not in the writing mood, I would jot the idea down in my notebook. If I am at home and eager to start typing, I would quickly think the plot through and then start writing.
I generally do not plan, as in pen and paper or flowcharts..., but recently, when I started writing my sci-fi novel, I have discovered that by drawing a fishbone or spider diagram, I am able to not just see the flow and links, but also mould the characteristics of each character better.
Happy Writing!!!
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I have always been a seat of your pants writer, which is fine for short stories but I do think that you need a plan for a novel because without one I can never get past the first few chapters. But actually creating a plan is extremely difficult.
Hope this helps.
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The famous author, Truman Capote, wrote a novel by writing the last chapter first. The novel was, of course, "In Cold Blood." The reason he wrote the last chapter first was, quite naturally, so that he knew how it would end. I believe it is imperative that you know how your novel is going to end. But, it is equally important, in my opinion, that you know how your novel is to begin and what happens in the middle. Planning, with all its details involving theme, character development, plot, events and scenes, is crutial to any good novel. Let's face it, you wouldn't go on a journey without knowing in advance where you are starting from and where you are going to, would you? It's all that stuff in the middle that you have to work out.
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