Gilbert M. Stack returns to AHMM with a continuation of his Pandora’s series. In this enlightening post, learn more about Gilbert’s writing process and the questions he considers as he sketches his plots
I have become an inveterate plotter over the past few years. I didn’t use to be this way. When I wrote my first story, “Pandora’s Luck,” for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, I had just the nugget of an idea about a lady gambler, Pandora Parson, with very strange luck who crossed paths with Corey Callaghan, a down-on-his-luck bare-knuckle boxer. Patrick Sullivan, the boxer’s trainer, got thrown in to explain why Corey kept showing up at poker games even though he doesn’t play cards. It took a couple of weeks mostly writing fifty or a hundred words a day to really figure out the details of my story and then several more drafts to get the tale in a form that made me happy.
This system worked great for me for five or six years as I sort of felt out my stories in the same way Corey might size up an opponent with a few test jabs. But the more I wrote, the more ideas I generated. And these moments of inspiration almost always came while I was plodding through the writing of another tale. Originally, I would push the new notion off to the back of my mind convinced that I could never forget something so wonderful and exciting. Except, it’s actually really easy to forget even the best concepts. But how to juggle finishing the story I was already immersed in with preserving the new idea? As you have doubtless guessed, the answer for me was plotting.
In the early days, this consisted of scribbling one or two sentence concepts in files for my different series, but I quickly discovered that writing those few lines sparked further ideas. As sentences became paragraphs became pages, I finally broke down and started writing chapter by chapter plots that often ended up being a third or more of the length of the completed stories. Dialogue, I found, was especially important to jot down when I first conceptualized it. Conversations between characters are critical devices for moving a story forward and imparting important information, and I find it is impossible to reconstruct good dialogue months later if all that I wrote down was a few summary sentences.
So, now I am an obsessive plotter, with sixteen novels and stories currently mapped out in enough detail that I might legitimately call them first drafts. I also have a score or three additional plots which are in some state of in progress. Several of those are just random sentences that I wrote twenty years ago, but many are serious beginnings of stories I hope to one day write. And that is, perhaps, the best thing about plotting. I can come back to write these tales tomorrow or twenty years from now with confidence that I can do them justice. And as new and better ideas for handling a situation in one of the stories occurs to me, I find it to be a lot easier to go back and edit a plot than it is a completed novel.
If you have the basic idea for a story of your own—whether it is a fully developed large golden nugget or just a tiny grain of sand—I strongly encourage you to take a few minutes to write it down today. You never know where it will lead, but once you have preserved it on paper or on your computer hard drive, you can be confident that you will never lose it and can only make it better.
Trace Evidence 