I’m excited to have interviewed Grace Flannagin on plot and pacing this past week. She is the impressively young author of Touched, the first book in a high-fantasy series in the works. You can find her on Amazon and Kindle. She’s a master. I hope you can take some pointers from her careful answers, and maybe a little encouragement from a fellow artist. Enjoy!
When did you start writing, and why?
I’ve loved stories and playing narrative games since I was very young, but the point where I would say I became engaged as a writer was in 3rd grade after I was inspired by a fantasy novel that showed me the power of writing to create complex, meaningful characters who could make moral decisions with implications that I could relate to. The novel also added a mystical aura around writing itself, as one of the characters became a writer over the course of the story. Since I was only in third grade I didn’t actually articulate this for myself at the time, but looking back I know I was drawn to writing by the lure of being able to explore difficult concepts for myself while also having fun with completely imaginary constructs.
What is your book about, and what inspired the idea?
Basically, my story is about a kid who has a lot of ability but not a lot of inspiration on how to use it. I felt like that, and that’s where that core came from. A lot of my personal conflicts at the time of writing— the balance between investing in friendships and investing in the more practical aspects of my future, feelings of loneliness, my confused frustration towards apathy in other people—built the spine of the story into what it was, while the fleshy bits (the world, the magic, the different species, the dragons…) came from the books I liked at the time, which were chock-full of the same things.
How did you know that Touched was the project you wanted to stick with?
Two things propelled me through the first chapter of my book. The first was that I was finally writing about a character who aesthetically matched my favorite fantasy tropes at the time. The second was that I shared the first paragraph of my writing with a fellow writer the moment I had written it— and then I kept sharing. The encouragement I received and the accountability of someone else knowing about my project really held me to be responsible for what I had started.
After that, and after sharing my writing with more of my friends, it was a matter of personal pride for me to keep working on my book, making progress towards the vision I was creating.
What did the plotting process look like for your book?
In a word: chaotic.
When I started writing everything was extremely, dangerously organic. I introduced and dropped characters at a whim. Anything that seemed ‘cool’ to me went into the story and I tried my hardest to make it fit into my insubstantial plot.
After I got about fifty pages down, I started making an outline for the rest of my book. The floating ideas from my organic writing had made logical paths for me to follow, or else they had become obviously extra and I knew I needed to cut them. I wanted to get these paths down, so I made my outline in a numbered list format. The end was easy to me, and the next step was fairly intuitive, if cloudy. The in-between space continually stumped me, so I continued to write as I plotted on the side, and once I got closer to the cloudy bits they cleared up and I could see ahead again.
The method worked, but I would not recommend it.
Do your plot and your pacing affect each other when writing a book?
I don’t typically consciously think “I need this sort of pacing,” either when writing a scene or when plotting it out, but I do think pacing and scene-plotting go hand-in-hand. For me, when I plan out a scene I imagine it chronologically with the rest of my story. Whether it should be fast or slow depends on what came before it and on the emotions of the scene itself. However, I wonder if it might improve my writing if I put more emphasis on thinking about pacing as I’m working on my plot. That’s something I’ll work with in the future.
Was pacing your book something that came easily, or did that have to be developed through several drafts?
In general, I feel like the pacing for my book came pretty naturally, except for this: anything that was supposed to be slow was extra slow, and anything that was supposed to be fast was extra fast. I knew what things were supposed to feel like, and I went for it a bit too hard. The basic pacing structure was there, and when I got around to revision it wasn’t hard for me to adjust things to be what I intended. Pacing is something to be slapped at on the first try, and then it can take a more delicate touch later when the story has made a cohesive whole.
Which are harder for you – slow or fast paced scenes?
I tend to enjoy faster scenes, but I write slower scenes more often. It’s difficult to say which I do better, but it would probably be the fast ones if I really had to pick. Slow scenes are hard for me to stay inspired with, and I find them hard in that way, while fast scenes are hard to find the right words for, which is hard because every word counts when you’re moving quickly.
How do you interweave character arcs into your plot?
My plot is created by the change I want to see in my characters and not the other way around. When I’m looking at where I want my story to go, I ask, “How do I want this character to change?” That’s how I decide what’s going to happen in my story. The plot is made of character arcs, not separate at all.
What makes a good story?
I think a good story is determined by the change it makes in the person who reads it. A good story makes the reader think and decide things, even if it’s an unconscious process. What was the hardest part of writing Touched? The hardest part for me was probably just ignoring crazy tangent characters and concepts that didn’t actually mean anything for my story. I struggled a lot with adding unnecessary details and being far too interested in them when I was feeling uninterested in my main cast.
What was the main mistake you made as a beginner, and what advice would you give to new writers?
My biggest mistake: I didn’t know where I was going even after writing dozens of pages. It cost me a lot of time to fix the weird paths I had taken in the effort to figure out where I was going. My biggest piece of advice would be to actually spend time thinking about the plot direction after getting ten, fifteen, twenty pages in. Going past that without a plan is going to make a lot of trouble. There’s always going to be a lot to do in revision, but it’s very alarming that a writer should have to go through complete re-writes of every single scene for the first seventy or eighty pages of the book.
Plot and Pacing Guest Post With Grace Flannagin
