Tales from the Circle

I usually think of planning as a matter of personal preference. And I often see others asking “what kind of planner are you?” Or “Are you a plotter or a pantser?” But I’ve recently started to realize that the amount and type of planning I do for a novel is not dependent on me, it’s more dependent on the story itself. Planning a fantasy novel is significantly different from planning a sci-fi novel, for example. That much is obvious to me. But even within these different genres each individual story needs a different type of planning. I’ve written a few novels now, only one of which has been published so far, but I’d like to look at the type of planning I did for each one. Children of the Dead City - Epic Fantasy ( Published ) This novel takes place in the fantasy world I’d been building for about 15 years before I wrote it. It’s actually the second version of the same story. I wrote an entire novel that focused on the character Hawk (but his name wasn’t Hawk back then) and...

Planning is great. I planned out Children of the Dead City chapter by chapter before I started writing. There were a few key scenes that I had imagined so vividly I couldn’t wait to get to them and write them down. And then I started writing it and, of course, the characters imposed themselves, things happened, and I discovered many interesting plot twists that I hadn’t planned out. I say discovered, because by the time you get a few chapters into writing such a long work you’re not really planning and plotting anymore, you’re just along for the ride, discovering and exploring the world and events with the characters. So the bare bones of the story, some of the main things that happened to Dargoth and Hawk especially, were pre-planned, but a lot of the other BIG events in the book are things that just happened. They just imposed themselves. I’ll try to reveal a few of them without giving spoilers: - Finns’ backstory and that thing that happened about halfway through the book ...