redsol2

To expand a bit on point 1 - you won’t truly know what you are until you try. I wanted desperately to be a pantser, wrote a terrible novel, and hated every moment of it. Then I tried planning and I’m having a much better time.

I was totally the same way when I wrote my first novel. I had the general flow of the story in my head with a few scenes, and somehow ended up with a 65k word manuscript just out of my head. It was a disjointed, poorly paced, poorly written, character arc-less, boring mess of a story.

It was a good learning experience though. I found out that I’m not a pantser. After learning some frameworks (Abbie Emmons on YouTube has some really helpful resources for Planners to use) and getting a full outline written, I’ve found writing my third novel to be so much easier.

I haven’t heard of Fabula cards, I’ll have to check it out. I’ve honestly just been using the sticky notes app on my Mac and the card-based overview in Scrivener.

TBH, the thing I disliked most about Reddit ended up being the community. It was nice having little niche communities, but wisps of inceldom, hivemind, and that general air of arrogance permeated the entire site. Killing the apps that made the site tolerable to use (Apollo, in my case) was just the last straw. I already used a plugin that deleted all of my posted content from the past 5 years, so I’m officially out, and it’s kind of a relief. I’ll stick to Discord interest servers and small communities like this one from now on.