Should crime fiction writers figure out the details of their plot before they write?
Harlan Coben doesn’t. John Grisham does. Robert Ludlum did, and how. George Pelecanos doesn’t. Unless he’s writing for The Wire, in which case the show-runner makes him do it.
I plot out my novels in detail. But lots of top writers don’t. I think they should, and I’ll tell you why in coming posts. Essentially non-plotters say they want to be as surprised by what happens as their readers. Plotters say they’d just never get the book done if they didn’t know what to write next.
This is Lee Child explaining why he doesn’t plot out his books (the whole thing’s worth listening to, but he starts answering a question about plotting at 2:04):
Now Lee knows what he’s talking about. But clearly he has some astonishing facility for plotting as he goes along. Because elsewhere in the lecture he says that he doesn’t do much rewriting and he only edits once.
What happens when you do that and you’re not Lee Child? Well, Lee persuaded Joseph Finder to try flying blind. Joseph usually plots things out and has a bunch of bestsellers to prove that it works for him. But to his credit he gave it a go. As he notes, he ended up spending a lot longer writing that book than he usually does.
Go to 11:27 in this video and you’ll see Laura Lippman explain how she figures out her plot in storyboard and other forms. But only once she’s done an initial draft or two of the novel.
I appreciate very much what Laura says about “getting away from text” to lay things out on cards or in a diagram. That’s precisely why I do it (before I start writing; I don’t see much point in doing it once you’ve already written the thing.)
A pictorial image of the novel in the form of a diagram or a board where the cards are arranged (as I’ll detail in a future post) to represent the movement of the plot helps you keep structure in mind. How many thrillers and crime novels do I toss aside around about two-thirds of the way through, because the hero is belting back and forth from one spot to another with no apparent direction.
That’s because the writer is doing exactly that, too.
If you plot, it won’t happen to you. More on that in coming posts.
Thank you! I tend to plot everything I write out, poems and stories, and was recently told I was preventing my characters from “surprising me” or being anything but one dimensional. That hasn’t happened to me(characters that surprise me) but what normally happens is that sudden insights into the plot itself happen. When it does, I add it in. It’s great to hear that that is “allowed”, or that not everyone does the no-plot method.
When you write, you’re the architect AND the engineer. What happens to the characters is the architecture. How the plot moves is the engineering. I think architecture comes first and then last, with a concept for the story and then the building that clads the middle portion — that’s the engineering, where you create a structure on which your book can stand.