As a writer, one of the most common questions I am asked is: “Where do you get your ideas for a novel?’ People seem to be fascinated with the initial part of the writing process, the conception of a story.

Authors, like the rest of the folks on the planet, are as different as grains of sand on a beach. Yet we share commonality as well. There seem to be two basic categories of novelists, Pantsers and Outliners. As I start my third novel, I am transitioning from one to the other.

Pantsers, as the name implies, are authors who write by the seat of their pants. They get an idea or concept for a story and sit down to write. This is exactly how I wrote my first two novels. My first novel, “The Best Dark Rain: A Post-Apocalyptic Struggle for Life and Love,” began as a serial. I was writing at least one chapter per week. The chapter was then uploaded to a website where my Beta-Reader Dark Army could read it. Woe betide me if the chapter was not complete.

My second novel, “Blood Rust Chains,” was written for the Nanowrite novel competition, which is held yearly in the month of November. The Nanowrite challenge is to write an entire first draft of a novel in thirty days. I was challenged by a friend of mine, also a writer, to participate in Nanowrite. The result, after a grinding thirty days, was a 65,000 word first draft. The idea for the novel came from a dream. From there, I simply tried to hammer it into a story in the allotted thirty days. Of course, that first draft was not a final, polished story. It was, however, an achievement that I am proud of and will probably never attempt to repeat.

Being a Pantser has its joys and sorrows. The joy comes from the organic process of simply beginning a story and tearing into it. The sorrow comes from dead-ends, corners written into, and not knowing exactly where the story is going to go. When I was writing the serial that would become my first novel, what was already uploaded for readers had taken on a life of its own. There was no turning back. To paraphrase the old saying: The Novel Must Go On.

Stories take on a momentum and life of their own. While I was learning the brutal lessons of marketing my first novel, a pile of ideas and notes was growing. This little pile became a file on my laptop, the icon where scraps of characters, ideas, and random thoughts were pigeon-holed. The file, in the upper-left corner of my desktop, continued to nag at me. It was forlorn and feeling forgotten. The nagging is a good thing, a sign that things are moving forward. So it was with this, the Working Title file. And so began my transition to being an Outliner.

An Outliner is, obviously, a writer who builds an outline. This is the antithesis of the Pantser. One saving grace for aspiring writers is that writers love to write, and writers love to write about the process of writing. I did a lot of homework on various methods and tools for outlining a novel. In so doing, I stumbled across the Snowflake Method espoused by Randy Ingermanson. The basic idea of the Snowflake Method is that the shape of a novel begins very simply. Write the novel in one sentence. This is a lot harder than it sounds, but it is a great exercise. Then expand that single sentence into one paragraph. Then expand each sentence of the paragraph into another paragraph. The idea is one of building a series of simple shapes that, when overlaid upon each other, become a complex shape: a snowflake. Thus began my outline.

My start date was the First of January. I am not a resolution person, but that is just how things worked out. Following the step-by-step directions, I built my outline. Over the next three weeks, I worked with diligence, following the Snowflake Method to the letter. As the sentences became paragraphs, and the paragraphs morphed into a concise list of scenes, I watched the entire story begin to take shape before my eyes. What emerged was the skeleton of a complete novel, consisting of thirty-four chapters and one hundred thirty scenes.

When I was a boy, I had a precious book. The book was “101 Elephant Jokes.” I used to torture my father with these jokes, which I thought were hilarious. One of the jokes went something like this: “How do you make a statue of an elephant? Simple, get a ten-ton block of granite and chip off anything that doesn’t look like an elephant.” This corny joke is, for me, at the core of being a Pantser. Now, as an Outliner, I am working from a totally different direction. Instead of reducing a giant pile of words into the shape of a novel, I am attaching words to a skeleton, adding the muscle and fiber of the story to the bones that support it.

The act of writing is, if nothing else, an amazing journey. There are many paths to the mountain, with the only caveat being: Tell a Good Story. How one arrives at that story is just a part of the process. I am very curious to see how this process will unfold as I hang the flesh of my tale onto the bones that will, hopefully, support it.

The outline is now complete. I will begin writing the first draft on Tuesday. One hundred and thirty scenes, each consisting of a thousand words or so, becomes a novel of 130,000 words. I hope to have the first draft completed by the end of April, or about one hundred writing days from now. That’s it, that is how it happens. Wish me luck, please, as I will need it along the way. And, as always, thanks for reading.