Writing Without a Map: Or, X Steps to Creating a New Fantasy Series

I’m the worst person to lead you through a stepped plan to any sort of goal. The format is popular for obvious reasons, and I’m sure the 12 steps have led a good many from alcohol dependence to sobriety. The first step here is to admit you’re a writer. The second step is to acknowledge that we come in as many different shapes, shades, and sizes writing-wise as we do people. And that, for me, is where this particular journey stops.

(Mark Lawrence: On the Awe of Libraries)

There are a lot of writers who follow very structured approaches to their work. There’s a great deal of comfort to be taken in the existence of a path to follow, a set sequence of activities that will result in the desired goal, all broken down into manageable stages. This is one reason that the format enjoys such popularity in the advice-giving business. Follow my plan and in just X days you will have visible abs, drop a dress size, or perhaps publish a bestseller.

I’m not here to tell you that this is all smoke and mirrors. There will be people reading this who have found or will find a plan that works for them, and that’s great. I’m here to let you know that there are others—like me—who are just fundamentally ill-suited to structure, people for whom no plan will ever deliver the goods be it 12 steps or a thousand.

The good news is that this is fine. We’re just another, equally good patch of life’s rich tapestry (also, it’s OK to throw in a hackneyed phrase every now and then if it’s one you like). I can describe 99 percent of how I write a fantasy series as follows: I start typing. I keep typing. Eventually I stop typing.

I don’t plan. I don’t consider pacing, or balance, or world-building, or character development, or magic systems. I don’t think of the books as mechanical objects or the process of writing them as anything other than letting a story flow out of me.

Now, as writing advice goes, this is a hard sell. “Just do it” isn’t particularly helpful to a struggling writer looking for the comfort of a list of tasks. On the other hand, to some of us it’s incredibly liberating to be told that good books can be written this way. To be told that popular stories can just come off your fingertips as you type. Because they can. And if you don’t feel comfortable with planning this, structuring that, writing lists of character notes, and all the other jobs that work for others … then don’t do it. Just tell your story.

When I start book one of a series, I don’t know how it’s going to end. I have no idea. I don’t know how the chapter I’m writing is going to end. I hope to surprise myself on every page.

This makes some people who hear me say it get a little angry. If you’ve no plan, they say, then the book would be a random jumble of poorly connected stuff. My reply is that when I read a book, I am constantly thinking what might happen next: Will X betray Y? Will the battle be over by the time they get there? Is Jim really a robot in disguise? And so on. If a group of characters set out from one city with the intention of reaching a nearby town, I have a reasonable expectation they will get there. But I didn’t write the book, I’m not planning it, I’m just reading it. These things may or may not turn out to be true.

My writing is similar. I have ideas about what might be going to happen. They become more and more tenuous as the timeline extends ahead of the now. But whether these things will happen or not is a different matter entirely. Often they don’t. Often the story takes a more interesting turn that suggests itself on the page as a consequence of something that’s just happened.

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Sometimes when I’ve sold a trilogy to a publisher on the basis of the first few chapters, they ask me what’s going to happen, how am I going to fill out three books? It’s risk management—if things go wrong, they want to be able to point to a handful of pages and say “we weren’t just firing into the dark.” When I’m forced to do that, I just make up any old nonsense that pops into my head. I never look at it again. I don’t follow it. My publishers have stopped asking for it.

Typically, I start writing with a character in mind. I generally have one point-of-view character, sometimes two. As I write, these characters develop into very definite people and I will reach the point where I know what they will do in different circumstances. After that, much of my writing is essentially following the character around, heaping obstacles in their path and then, when we get to the crunch, seeing how they overcome them.

I was in a Q&A with a very successful fantasy writer, and he was asked about his writing process. He described planning out each book so that he had a handful of pages covering the main twists and turns of the plot. From there he wrote a detailed set of notes for each chapter. The next step was to turn those notes into a handful of lines for each page. And then, finally, he would replace each line with four or five lines, filling the page up with the dialogue, description, and action called for in the plan.

This approach has sold him millions of books and won him great acclaim, and it may well be that he could write you a 12-step plan that would help you to emulate his triumphs.

I couldn’t follow such a path. Knowing what was going to happen next would suck the joy out of writing for me. It would turn it from a passion to a chore. But we’re all different, and the important thing is to get that story on the page. Hopefully, by hanging out here under the false pretences of offering an X-step guide, I have freed some of you from the burden of believing that you need one.

Have fun!

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