The Type of Writer I Am

My journey to writing has been an interesting one, and despite my very logical, linear brain, I am not a natural plotter. I am much more of a discovery writer. My daughter Emalyn, on the other hand, is a firm plotter, even though her brain is not linear, but rather thinks randomly. I don’t write the next scene until I’ve finished the one before. She leaves massive gaps in her story and writes whatever excites her in that present moment.

I find these differences fascinating, and would be curious to know if it’s a consistent pattern in ‘plotters’ and ‘pantsers’, or whether Emalyn and I are just a crazy amazing team—for our linear/discovery random/plotting dichotomy really complement each other!

So that’s the first thing I’ve learnt—that I’m a linear thinking discovery writer. And that is not an insignificant detail! For it means I can filter the overwhelming plethora of resources, tools, webinars, apps, writing advice etc through that knowledge and assess whether a particular ‘something’ might be useful or not. In-depth plotting tool? I’ll probably pass, but a flexible methodology that allows me to reverse engineer my story? My interest is piqued.
 

Writing is a Craft

The second important thing I’ve learnt is that writing is a craft: a skill that can be taught and honed. It’s not some nebulous thing that can’t be quantified. There are reasons writing either works, or doesn’t work, and they can be identified and fixed. I am forever grateful to the person who introduced me to The Story Grid so I could get a handle on this early on. The way Shawn Coyne has codified all the elements that go into working stories will be a gift to writers forever.

This would be a wonderful discovery just for myself, but the corollary to learning this is that I now get to give that gift to others! That’s why I started my alpha/beta reading service. When craft considerations started clicking for me, I found that I could pinpoint what was missing in other people’s writing on a global scale. That was exciting! I now find great pleasure in giving others the concrete, actionable feedback I wished I could have obtained on my early drafts. Maybe then I would not be re-writing so much now!
 

Genre

When I started out, I had no idea that genre went any deeper than commercial genre. I was writing fantasy, that was all I needed to know, right? Wrong! Genre is so much more than fantasy, crime or romance. In fact, I discovered ‘fantasy’ wasn’t even a genre at all as such, but only a component of genre. So then I had to try and figure out what kind of fantasy story I was writing. Was it action? Love? Worldview? Status? Truth was, it had elements of all of these, and to my horror, even ‘horror’!

Then I discovered something even more amazing—that the best stories, the ones that really grip us and become classics—blend elements of six foundational genres (action, love, horror, worldview, morality, status) but place emphasis on one of them. Woo hoo! Now I only had to figure out which one I was emphasising …

Honestly, genre is such a huge topic, and far more complex than I ever imagined. Understanding it has been instrumental in providing me with helpful constraints and waypoints to ensure I meet (and hopefully exceed!) reader expectations. Now I just need to take everything I’ve learnt, and hammer out the story I’ve been given into a beautiful and finely balanced sword that will pierce the souls of readers. Sorry, not sorry!