Writing...Just because!

“First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!”  Ray Bradbury Over the past five years, which is actually when I started writing fiction, I have grappled with the question of whether I’m a plotter or a pantser. You know, the plotter being the writer who is keen to develop the entire plotline, laying points on a graph, identifying the ‘inciting incident’ and all the ‘energetic markers’ and where they appear, above or below the plot line; and the pantser being the writer who writes by the seat of his or her pants. I definitely pantsed my way through my first novel and then got stuck mid-way through my second and the only way I could get unstuck was to complete a chapter outline. Not necessarily a plotter move, but somewhere in the middle. My favourite - supposedly JK Rowling's outline for Order of the Phoenix So here I sit, happily in the middle, swaying from one side to the other, as needed. When preparing for my recent Paradise Writers’ Retreat , I de...