I'm a hybrid!

I’ve decided to hybridize myself. Lots of writers are plotters-they plan out every detail of the path their story will take. And others write by “the seat of their pants” and are called pantsers. I decided to be a combination of both. So I henceforth am a plotster.

I found that I over did the plotting on some of the books I was working on so that I lost interest by the time I sat down to write the story. So then, I decided to be a pantser and not plot anything. I got part way into the story and completely lost the thread of what I was doing, partially because I didn’t know how to portray what was in my head, and my writing fizzled out. So, neither one worked for me.

I asked myself when I had enjoyed writing the most. And found that I do best when I have just a basic character sketch and one-liner clues/basic timeline w/ a few notes on plot conflict and motivation. May be that still makes me a plotter but I still claim the right to take off in a direction that my characters want to go and see where it takes me.

I’ve decided to pull out some of my old manuscripts, ones that I had grown tired of, and rework them a bit without choking the life out of them. I feel better now. The first one I’ll do after I finish this Novella MS because it goes w/ the theme and I hope to sell them as a group/anthology as a start to a series. See, the one I’m doing now was idea #3. #2 is done but #1 was …>Horrible!<… Hopefully I know how to make it work now.