My fellow budding authors, when creating and working out plots do you discuss your ideas with anyone? If so how do you go about it?
My fellow budding authors, when creating and working out plots do you discuss your ideas with anyone? If so how do you go about it?
No
Yes. I have very detailed discussions with my two dogs 😉
Do they tell you all your ideas are “rough”?
I don’t tend to discuss my plots with anyone while I’m writing but I do have a selected couple of close friends who read chapters as I write – the whole plot often doesn’t come to me before I start anyway – I have an idea then work from there. So there wouldn’t be anything to discuss til much later.
I also use an Alpha beta reader (humanoid, not canine) and send bits to her as I scribble them.
No, I don’t tell anybody what my books are about until they’re finished. But they are roughly plotted before I start.
I will often give a rough synopsis of how the story works without giving too much detail to a very select couple of friends, just to make sure it works as an idea
I only discuss if I’ve written myself into a bit of a corner. To be honest, I’ve never got anything much to discuss because I generally have no idea where it’s going anyway. I get there in the end. At around the 40,000 word mark I send it to a couple of friends for feedback. That works well because I don’t send them the finished article, they have to buy that lol!
Well it was thanks to a discussion with someone I realised I missed a rather obvious error in terms of character names
Yes, my dog Fleur pointed something similar out to me 😉
I’m sure you weren’t left with a hard to get rid of mental image
Oops 😉
Never. Once it’s written it’s a conversation starter with my hubby. My plots send him to sleep late at night. It’s like story time with a woman who suffers from ADD and multiple personality disorder from midnight only.
I just ran my Sooty glove puppet idea past Hannah (my slightly psychotic heroine is escorting a jihadi prisoner to the coast and has decided to talk to him only via Sooty) and she couldn’t stop laughing. So it’s going in.
(Hannah’s my writing partner obviously. Not a glove puppet)
They grew up and worked in the Government PREVENT programme
No. I maybe tell a friend a one line idea but that is all.
I find it really helps to talk to someone, to hear myself going through the plot out loud. Getting asked questions then makes me delve deeper into what I am writing is really about, helps me get to know it more, you know. So, yep. I find it really helps 🙂
I discuss it with my agent, but only briefly, and then I just sit down and bang it out in solitude. Truth be told, I’m always a little bit embarrassed about new plots.
I like to keep it all to myself at the plotting stage…
In terms of plot, my editor asks me to prove it. Then she makes me prove it to a few investigative journalists on the national newspapers, a couple of senior police detectives and a publishing lawyer with a sworn affidavit – and then…if I’m very lucky…it will make the cut… >:o
That’s harsh! Whatever happened to willing suspension of disbelief? Or artistic licence?
@Alan Haha! I know – it’s a tough way to write! Keeps me in line though…