Today I’m starting a highly personal sets of post. It will be about my journey into creating a book. A whole one. And hopefully you’ll find tips to help you as well.

So my dilemma is about plotting. How much plotting does one need before writing?

So for my book, I had an idea and a basic plot in my head.

And I started to write the first scenes and other significant scenes. I got those scenes critics as part of my MA workshop and what came out was that my main character was inconsistent.

One of my friend said it was because I was not writing chronologically.

I believed he was right.

So I started to write in chronological order. And I wrote and I wrote. And because of the structure of my book I realised I could write by the meter and never get anywhere. But I was not writing a soap. I needed my book to get somewhere.

So I realised I needed to plot and to plot really well, if I didn’t want to end up with endless pages of nothing really.

I found that really difficult actually, and quite daunting. Then I came across this post, from Alexandra Sokoloff’s blog. And it really helped.

I put down on a board all the scenes I had written. The one I thought I should write and try and arrange them in such a way that there would be progression, suspense and climax. It took some time, but it was time worth spent.

Of course I don’t think I could have plotted right from the beginning, but I truly believe it was vital to do it at one point.

Of course there is no one way to write a book. And one can also just write all the scenes and then order them around. It worked pretty well for Sally Nicholl’s first book, Ways to live forever.

So I guess it’s all about finding what works for you.

I think I have.

Try it and let me know how it’s going for you.