Freya asked Lauren Willig:

I'm a devoted fan of the Pink Carnation series. (Even if you didn't clearly share my passions for Shakespeare, Blackadder, and Wodehouse, I'd still adore every volume.) I'm an aspiring novelist, and I definitely desire this woman's art, and her scope. How you go about constructing your plots? What are your outlines like? Do you start with the end? How do you make your middles so taut and exciting?

Lauren Willig Freya, thank you so much! That is so kind of you. As to your question.... What are these "outlines" of which you speak? Does not compute.

Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration. I tend to start with character rather than plot. The hardest bit for me is trying to figure out who these people are, what makes them tick, and how they'll react to any given situation. Getting to know them takes the largest investment in time. I generally spend a few months writing and rewriting the first couple of chapters as I struggle to get a handle on my main characters and why it's important that they are where they are at this moment in time. (If that makes any sense.)

I plot roughly three to five chapters ahead. I need to have some sense of where I'm going, to provide a sense of trajectory, but if I plot too far ahead, I get ahead of myself and my characters and find myself getting stuck, trying to pigeonhole my characters into plot points that might have made sense in my head in the abstract, but no longer make sense after the developments of the last few chapters. I've learned that I need to keep stopping and replotting-- a bit like one of those old school GPS models that seemed to be eternally chanting "recalculating route... recalculating route...."

I always have an idea of where the story is going and what the end will be, but I've learned not to inquire too closely into that or to plot it out in too much detail until I'm about two-third to three-quarters of the way through or I hit that "trying to pigeonhole" problem.

In other words, it's rather a messy system!

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