Does Everybody Plot Like This?

We’re curious about something, and hoping some readers will chime in with ideas. The basic question is, “Are we weird?” We already know we are, in numerous ways. But we would like to know if it applies specifically to how we plot our stories.

The way we do things, we always nail down the What first, and mostly the Who, then the Why and How are the last parts to come into focus. That is an oversimplification, of course. The details of a What will often shift once we know the Why that goes with it, or a What might get assigned to a different Who, and so on. But in broad strokes, first we figure out the events and then we go back to study them and refine them.

It makes us feel like investigators. We know what happened, and we have a fair idea who did it, so we’re trying to learn what makes them tick. Get under their skin and understand how they’d be capable of such behavior. Ultimately the key need for us is to know these characters utterly, to be able to see and smell and touch their world. Although it might seem backwards, we find that having the plot mapped out first lets us know the characters more deeply by the time we start composing actual prose.

So: does that seem like a weird way to handle things? Or, is it (shudder) “normal”?

A writing partner is exactly as weird as necessary.