“I thought art was a verb, rather than a noun.” (Yoko Ono)

Critics are unanimous about my work: my characters are flat, my environment is dull, my style is hopeless, my vocabulary has the level of a five-year-old, the tone of my stories urgently needs a tuning fork and as long as I give my books away for free, I will never become a successful full-time professional writer. But there is one thing that makes me proud: I write great plots. That is because I plan my stories.

There are two types of writers: the Planner and the Go-Ahead-With-The-Goat. Writing is like going on a vacation. You can plan to go to Greece, search information about your destiny, book the trip and the hotel, all inclusive, meals and drinks and entertainment and excursions, not one minute left to be bored. Or you can just take your passport and your money, close the door behind you and be on your way, curious where the trip will bring you because the surprise of what you will find is part of the fun.

The planner might end up in Greece, but without the guarantee that the trip will be a success: the pictures of the hotel were taken before the earthquake, the food looks nice but tastes awful, the sea is filled with salt water and it rains the whole week. The goat-writer might think: “I wanted to go to Greece and now I end up in Gibraltar, but Gibraltar is nice too so I don’t regret the trip.”, but it is also possible that he gets lost on the way or keeps walking around in circles.

We can conclude that there is no difference: both planning and just-go-for-it can lead to success or to disaster. That’s why we start with having a look at planning. If you know how it can be done, you can always choose not to do it.

My personal following order of events that lead to a story is this:

1.       I have an idea. I think it over and when it’s a good idea, more ideas will follow. I heard a businessman once say “Every day I have about 10 good ideas, and I’m successful because I manage to realise 1 idea each year.” Not every idea is a good idea and not every good idea leads to a good story. For me, a good idea means that it is followed by a waterfall of other ideas and they make me so enthusiastic that I can’t do anything else but start to work on it.

2.       I start to make notes, work out some details, do some research and think the story over and over and over. I save these notes and details and ideas for later. This stage of the project might easily take a year, but it’s the part of writing that I like best of all. The story starts ‘to fall from the sky’. I read a line in a book, see a picture in a magazine or hear a phrase in a movie, and think: “That’s something I can use for my story…” Inspiration is everywhere. You just have to recognise it, grab it by the tail and put it in your pocket.

3.       The story starts to come alive. I HAVE to write some scenes, work out some plotlines and before I know it I’m writing the draft. Someone once asked Stephen King: “Why do you write the stories you write?” and Stephen answered: “Why do you think that I have a choice?” That’s what happens to me all the time…

4.       When the draft is finished, I start reading it over and over and over, correcting errors in grammar and typing, editing lines and sometimes whole paragraphs or scenes. This is the most time-consuming part of the story. When writing the draft takes me 3 to 6 weeks, the editing phase usually takes 6 to 10 weeks. This is the moment when I have the whole story in my head, think it over when doing other things, making it complete. At this time, I usually only work on this one story. I limit the work on other stories to writing down ideas and making short notes.

5.       When is the story finished? You just know. You’ve said everything that you wanted to say, you’re satisfied with how you said it, you read it one more time from start to finish, just because you like it so much, and you feel happy. This is the best moment ever, the moment when you get this feeling ‘Wow, I can’t believe I did this. This is the best I’ve ever written and I will never write anything better in the rest of my life.’, which lasts until… you have your next idea for a story that will get even better. Writing is simple: once you know how to do it, you can only get better.

6.       The last step in the process is when you start to send out the story to your friends, your beta-readers, the people you trust and who’ll give you feedback on your work. This is something you have to learn: the story is your baby and others will tell you that its ears are too big and his hair is too short. Criticism is meant to make you better. Criticism is just the opinion of somebody else and… he’s always right. This doesn’t mean that you have to change everything because of the opinion of others. Of course not. It’s your story and you write it the way you want. But you have to try to look at your work through the eyes of your readers: when you feel the need to ‘explain why’, usually you didn’t write it clearly enough. If the readers don’t understand, the writer has to write it better.

Every story starts with an idea. Everyone gets hundreds of ideas every day (like that idea I have right now, to make myself a nice cup of coffee…. Ah, that really was a great idea). Some ideas are great, other ideas have potential and some ideas are best forgotten immediately, like that idea that you should vote Whatshisname for President (forget it; his only message is: “Look at ME! I’m FABULOUS!”).

For this example of planning, we need a really good idea. How about this: Annie visits the village of her grandmother and gets lost in the woods where the local people accuse her of being a witch. Wow. That is a great idea. It has action, magic, suspense, an interesting environment and even a real hero with the name Annie. Such a great idea will make a great story. Such a great idea produces a waterfall of other ideas, like the name of the grandmother (Grannie) and the fact that Annie is accused of witchcraft because she has a tattoo of a spider web on her arm and…

This is where the first problem comes up: my head is too small for all those ideas. I need to invent something, to avoid that I will forget all those wonderful ideas. I need something that helps me to organise the ideas so they will help me when I start with the writing. As a writer I can only think of one solution: I have to write them down.

Here is the moment when every writer will get his own ideas about what she likes. Some make notes on coloured, sticky papers, others write on whiteboards, you can use apps on your tablet or computer, I know someone who voice-records his ideas with his mobile phone, but my favourite tool for notes is a notebook. A small notebook and a pen are cheap, easy and always available. Keep one close at hand and train yourself to write down every idea you have.

It doesn’t really matter how you make your notes, how you save your ideas for later, but it should be clear that the next step will be to organise all these ideas, put them together and in the following order that helps you with the writing. It’s okay if you do that ‘on paper’ if you create a file of every story with some sort of separate-pages-system like those two-hole ring binders and notepads with holes in the margins. If you prefer planning on paper, I advise you to buy nice stationary, notepads and pens that encourage you to work, and that you take the time to organise your notes in your folder in a neat and orderly way. It is much more fun to work with a file that is organised and beautiful.

Lots of writers have good experiences with Scrivener, so perhaps you should try it and find out. I read that Scrivener organises all elements of your novel like I organise it in Word and like others do on paper. The only thing that matters is that it works for you.

There is a technique that is called ‘the snowflake-technique’, but I live in a tropical country where snowflakes don’t survive one minute, so we can’t use that. I use something that I call ‘the step-sheet’. It is based on the snowflake technique, it provides space to keep my notes together and it is very easy to organise everything and put it into the right order.

What I do is collect and organise my ideas and notes in the computer. I have a folder on my hard-disc with the name ‘Writing-stuff’ and in that folder, I create a sub-folder for every story I work on. The name of that sub-folder is the working title of my story, so I decide that this story of Annie will get the working-title ‘Witch-hunt’, which is not a very good title, but I can always change that later.

From a lady-writer on Wattpad I learned the idea of ‘The Book of Thoughts’, one file where you can store every idea that is not (yet) connected to a story. I tried it, I liked it, I started to use it and I’m sorry I forgot her name because she deserves all the credit. In the same _general-directory as the Book of Thoughts I created a file ‘Write Right.doc’, where I keep all the notes about writing, notes I pick up from books and things I learn at the writing-better-club at Wattpad. It inspires to be at Wattpad.

In my Witch-hunt folder, I can save all kinds of documents, photos etc. that I use for the final story, but the two most important files are ‘_WitchHunt – Stepsheet.doc’ and ‘_WitchHunt – Manuscript.doc’, two Word documents. Why two? When I write the manuscript in the Manuscript-doc, I have the Stepsheet-doc open in another window on the side, so I have my notes available when I need them. The _ underscore in the title of the doc file is a little trick so the two files are always the first in the list of files when I open the folder.

The layout of my Stepsheet-doc is always the same. I take a new, blank document, type the working title of the story, hit enter a few times, press Ctrl-Enter to start a new page and type the following:

1.       High Concept, cover text  and meta-data

2.       Step-sheet

3.       Characters

4.       Background, environment and research

5.       Scenes and snippets

6.       Ideas

These lines are the six ‘chapters’ of my step-sheet. I mark the style of each line as ‘heading 1’. In each chapter, I can add as many ‘sub-chapters’ as I need. In chapter 3 – characters I can add sub-chapters like 3.1 Annie / 3.2 Grannie / 3.3 Other people. I mark each sub-chapter as ‘heading 2’. With Ctrl-End, I can easily hop to the end of the file to add that idea I just got. The last step is to go back to the first page (with Ctrl-Home) and insert a Table of Contents.

This Table of Contents is your ‘navigator’, the tool to jump quickly from one item in the step-sheet to another. All you have to do is Ctrl-Home to reach the index and Ctrl-Click on the line that represents the chapter you want to go to. It’s easy and very simple to work with, no special software needed, just a little knowledge of Word (or any other program you use to write with).

If these terms like Table of Contents or Header 1 is rocket science to you: please invest time to study the possibilities of your word processor. It pays off. Word is the tool of the writer, like a hammer is the tool of a carpenter. If you work with your tool every day, you should spend time to learn what you can do with it. Investment in knowledge always gives the best interest. You can work efficiently, save time and become a better writer, just by knowing what you can do with your computer. I’m sure you use the tab-button instead of ten times the space bar when you want the text to step away from the left margin, but I knew at least one professional secretary who never used the tab button, because she didn’t know what Tab meant, and she never had the time to look it up because of all those spaces that she had to type…

I use ‘codes’ between [brackets] in the titles of the sub-chapters, so I can see in my index, my Table of Contents, the status of each item (I do the same in my draft). The # hash tag is a sign that you’ll never use, so perfect for reminders. With Ctrl-F, you can find them quickly. Code [###] means ‘nothing done yet’, while [##] tells me that I’ve only made a start and [#] that there is something left to finish. Code [OK] stands for ‘I did not forget to put a code here’. When I’m writing and I don’t remember the name of the dog, I write [#what’s the name of the dog?#] in the text. When I have time available to write, but my creativity took a day off, the step-sheet always gives me an excuse to work on the story. There is always some research to do, always some background or environment or character to work out, always some # to search for and follow up.

Now that we have our document, our chapters and our navigator, it is time to start with filling chapter 1 – High Concept, Cover text  and Metadata. There is no reason to start with chapter 1 and work out every chapter until chapter 6. On the contrary: you can take every note and put it in the chapter or paragraph where it belongs. The file is just a coat rack, a hat tree, to organise all our ideas and notes together in an easy-reference following order. We only use the following order of the step-sheet here to explain the details of each chapter.

The High Concept of our story is that one sentence, that idea ‘Annie visits the village of her grandmother and gets lost in the woods where the local people accuse her of being a witch.’ I make a sub-chapter 1.1 High Concept and put that idea there. I can add more basic ideas in the beginning and move them to chapter 2 when the time is ripe.

My sub-chapter 1.2 is called To-Do-list, but I have to confess I’m not good with To-Do-lists. My first point on my To-Do-list is always ‘fill this list with things you have to do and will forget if you don’t write them down’, my second point is ‘read and follow-up the points of your To-Do-list frequently’, and that’s it. I guess I’m more the Have-Done-list type. Looking at all those things to do makes me feel nervous, makes me want to do other things, things that are no obligation because they are not on a To-Do-list. I like to start my day and think ‘What am I going to do today?’ and I like that to be a surprise, something that I really look forward to, something I just thought of, something really creative like washing the car or killing the weeds in the garden or washing the dishes. I have this bad habit of starting with the work that has to be done but nobody really likes, and I do those things with a happy mind because I know that when it’s done, the reward comes: I can spend some time on writing. And most of the time I wash the dishes or clean up the garden, while my head is already working on that story I am writing.

When the story is finished, I fill chapter 1 with subs like 1.3 Metadata (ISBN etc.), 1.4 Cover text, 1.5 List of publishers I have sent the story to, 1.6 List of promotional actions I did for the story etc. There is a lot of info that I want to save and keep together, even when the story is finished, so when I have a step-sheet, it seems a good idea to use it for that info too.

The next chapter, 2 – Step-sheet, is where we work on the plot itself, on the story-line. Here we use the snowflake. We take the idea of our basic plot and start to add chapter titles (or short descriptions about what will happen in each chapter). When that structure is more-or-less clear and complete, we can promote each chapter title to ‘heading 2’, for our index, and start to add info and ideas about what will happen in that chapter. For our Witch Hunt-story we could do that like this:

2.1             Annie visits Grannie.
Describe the village. Add some dialogue to show how nice Annie is and how much Grannie missed her.

2.2             Annie goes for a walk in the woods.
She gets lost. Her mood changes from happy to doubtful to worry to panic.

2.3             Annie meets the local wood-people.
First, Annie feels happy (safe), but when the local people see that Annie has a tattoo of a spider web on her arm, they accuse her of being a witch and turn hostile.

2.4             The people want to burn Annie.
The people tie Annie to a tree and put dry wood under her feet, so they can burn her. Annie tries to convince the people that she’s innocent, that they make a mistake, that she tries to give up smoking and burning her will not help. The people don’t listen. They want the barbecue. The reader should be biting his nails by now.

2.5             Annie escapes
Annie understands that she’s the hero of the story, so she should do heroic things if she wants to get out. She says a spell to change herself into a cat, so she can escape from the ropes and the fire. Then she takes her magic wand and turns all the others into frogs. She picks up the frog that before was a cute blond boy with blue eyes, kisses him with the hope that he will turn into a prince, too bad, it doesn’t work, this is a horror story, not a fairy tale, so Annie takes one of the cars of the others and drives home.

Now we have the space to add our other ideas and organise our story. As you see the discovery of the spider web in 2.3 is a key moment in the plot. We can go to 2.1 and introduce this tattoo to the reader: Grannie sees the tattoo and tells Annie about the people in the woods, who believe that witches had tattoos of spider webs in the old days. You will never be able to do something like this when you’re a Goat-writer because he just writes the first chapter without thinking about the third chapter. Writing good plots is nothing but technique, and planning your story is the way to do it.

Important is that you have the whole story available, compact and in order, and it’s hardly any work to add or change or cross out anything. Imagine you had the whole draft written out and at that moment you decide that Annie and the cute boy with the blue eyes meet in the village, that he invites her for a walk in the woods. Changing the draft would be a lot of work, but changing the step-sheet is easy and no work at all.

In general: every story needs a whole lot of thinking. You can do that thinking when the story is finished, or you can start with it. When you write the draft several times because you forgot something, I’m sure it will be a good exercise too and it will make you a better writer.

The use of chapter 3 – Characters is clear: here you make sub-chapters for every important character that plays a part in the story.

One tip is to write a bio about everyone, a list of facts like date of birth (sign of the Zodiac, Chinese horoscope), his height and weight and age, the colour of her hair, the place where he lives, school and education, name of parents, siblings and pets, hobbies, character, customs she has and every other detail you can think of. The story will not tell about the dog that Annie has at home, but you, as a writer, should know the name of that dog. When you work out the bio, your character will come alive in your head and you will write better stories.

As an exercise you can write some scenes with your characters, put them in a traffic jam or lost in Hong Kong or discussing what to have for dinner or who to vote for president, just to find out how they react, to get to know them better. You are the director of a movie, doing the auditions with all those wanna-be stars who want the main part in your next novel: let them act, see what they can do and get to know them before you give them the role. You’ll never use the scenes, but it is a lot of fun to write them.

The other tip about characters is: find yourself a model. When this great story of Annie becomes the next Hollywood blockbuster, we would like to have Angelina Jolie take the role of Annie. In Maleficent Angelina was great and in Tomb Raider she proved knowing something of woods too. So when we write that Annie says: “Bollocks!”, we take a look at the photo of Angelina (that we saved in our WitchHunt-folder) and think: “No. She wouldn’t say that.”, so we change Annie’s line into: “Oh, dear…” Of course, you can also take your sister, your grandma or your schoolteacher as a model. Writing great, lovable, believable characters is not just talent; it’s also a lot of technique and little tricks that you can learn.

What can be said about characters, can also be said about chapter 4 – Environment and Research. Here you save your map of the village or the woods, the info you found on spider webs and magic and witches, a folder from Marks & Spencer with the latest models of magic wands and everything else that you think is important for your story.

A description of the environment helps you to make the story better, like the bio helps you to create better characters. What time of the year is it? Does it snow or rain? Are there hills or rocks or mountains or lions in the woods? Which year is it? If the story takes place in 1700, you should change that part where Annie goes back in the car. Do the people speak with a strange accent that makes it hard to understand them?

If you find info on the internet: cut and paste the web link to your step-sheet. There is nothing so annoying as to know you read it somewhere, but you forgot where.

Chapter ‘6 – Ideas’ is to collect your notes that you can’t use (yet) in the story. Save them to read for inspiration and perhaps you can use them for the next story or for a sequel. You never know what a good idea might bring you or when you can use it.

Imagine you have this idea: “Annie has black hair but she dyed it blond, like Madonna”. When your story is still in the early stage of development, you save this note in chapter 6 – Ideas. When you start working on the plot, you start reading your notes and you realise that this note has info that is important for both the bio of Annie and for one or more chapters in the plot. You cut the note from chapter 6, you paste it into chapter 3.1 – Annie, you paste it again in chapter 2.1 Annie meets Grannie (you add the text: ‘Grannie sees that Annie has dyed her hair and asks why she did that. Annie replies: Blonds have more fun.’) and in chapter 2.3 – The people accuse Annie of being a witch (you add the text: “A cute blond boy with  blue eyes notices that Annie has dyed her hair and cries out: “Witches always have black hair.”).

The idea is that chapter 6 only contains the ideas you didn’t use. When you know how and where you can use an idea, you move it to the chapter where you need it. I use the ‘split window’-option from Word when I move notes from one chapter to another. When I have notes that I don’t think I will use, I move them to sub-chapter 6.1 – Notes I probably will not use (I also have a sub-chapter 6.2 – Notes, not yet classified). That way I avoid reading notes over and over again without doing anything with them. It’s not witchcraft but discipline. The magic word is not ‘abracadabra’ but ‘organise’.

Chapter ‘5 – Scenes and snippets’ is for ‘that other writer’, the goat-writer, the one that prefers to start with the trip to see where it takes him. If you have this great scene in mind, that scene that you HAVE to write down, although you have no idea about the rest of the story, just write it down in the step-sheet chapter 5 instead of in a blank document. You can do the rest of the planning, the collection of the other ideas, when that great scene is ready. Just bend the whole story around the scenes you wrote.

If you make a ‘template’ of a blank step-sheet (with the index and the chapters already prepared), you only have to copy the template, rename it and start writing in chapter 5. No extra work, no extra charge and all the organisation for planning is already there. If you only use the tip about the navigator and the [###]-codes, I’m already glad I could help you.

There is a big advantage in writing scenes before you finish the whole planning. If you start with writing the key scenes of your story, you’ll read them over and over while you work on the other chapters. When you put more time and effort in a scene, it usually gets better.

There is no rule that says that you should start writing with chapter one and go on until the happy end. I don’t like rules in writing. I like finals. Not only the final of the FA-cup and the Champions League, but also stories with a good final chapter. The ending is always the part that the reader will remember best. If the reader likes the end, he’ll give more stars to the whole book. If I start with writing the final chapter, I know ‘where I go to’, so I can make the rest of the story fit better to the end and I can work longer on the final chapter to make it fit better with the rest of the story. That’s the secret of writin