Tag: Prewriting

On Prewriting, Part 5: Setting

top view of man putting cards with text of acts of a play on a table

Welcome to The Writing Lab, where I try to pass along any insights into the craft of writing I’ve learned during the past thirty years.

For the past four editions of the lab, I’ve discussed the process of prewriting, the start of the writing process where you begin to develop your ideas, transferring them for the first time from inside your head and onto the printed page or electronic file. After discussing some of the basics behind prewriting, taking a look at how I’ve developed stories over the years, how to build characters, and a quick discussion of plotting. let’s spend this weekend talking about another important aspect of prewriting, which is setting.

[AUTHOR’S ONGOING NOTE FOR THIS SERIES:] The advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing; however, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well.

The Where and When: About Setting

Photo by Aaditya Arora on Pexels.com

The setting of a work of fiction is based on two different factors – when the story takes place and where it takes place. I would say the latter has the more impact on the story rather than the former, for reasons I’ll get into in a little bit. One thing I will say, however, might be one of my rules of thumb, which I will list below:

The difficulty of constructing a setting for your story is in direct proportion to how similar your setting is to your existing time-space circumstances. The farther removed your fictional setting is from your own surroundings, the more difficult it will be to develop and maintain it.

Into the Time-Slip

I plan to keep this section brief.

The vast majority of stories told in the past, told now, and will be told in the future are presented in past-tense – essentially, a story told which occurred sometime in the past. Few stories are told as if they are occurring right now (present-tense) and much fewer act as if they are telling a story occurring in the future (future-tense). It takes considerable mental energy to keep when is happening straight in your heard, especially if what happens is fictional1.

Again, the same rule I mentioned above applies: the farther away the time period of your story is, the less you know about your setting. For example, if your story is set in the 1920’s, do you know what life was like without the Internet, or without mobile phones, or functioning electricity in half the places you traveled, or with the presence of however many mentally traumatized veterans of the Great War wandering around? Unless you’re a ghost or you’ve done your homework on those times, the answer to this question is likely “not very much.” So, you will either have to pull your story back to a time more familiar to you, or you need to buckle down and get your homework done2.

This also works in reverse if you ware thinking of future settings. Even though the whole point of science fiction writers is to prognosticate and consider what is to come after us, it’s always a tricky process to do well3. I won’t get into the issue much here, but especially if you are working on a first draft, go ahead and make your best guess. Don’t worry, you can always sort out your issues in the later revisions.

Now, let’s talk about place.

Where are You? Where is Your Story?

First, as with time, the further away the place of your story is from your own experiences, the less you will have personal knowledge of it. As with time, you’ll have to do your homework, or in the instance of you fantasy and science fiction writers out there, you’ll have to think long and hard about what this place and the affiliated people, societies, and cultures are all about. And maybe you borrow ideas from other cultures, blend them together into your own ideas, or you come up with your own “unique” ideas you don’t realize you borrowed from multiple cultures and/or places until months or years later. However, you should also know if you borrow from your own experiences, you are going to want to alter that setting a bit so it doesn’t precisely mirrors your real life4.

When I think about the concept of place in fiction, at least two stories come to mind.

  • When I was in high school during the late 1980’s, a Nintendo NES console replaced my aging Atari 2600 get-up which had served me for much of that decade. Of course, I was addicted to console gaming at the time, but what surprised me then was my mother becoming nearly as interested in my console as I was. In particular, she was addicted to the original Zelda game. In this game, Link would find certain maps to the underground area of Hyrule or whatever it was and you would have to walk through each area to show where things were at on the map you can see from the pause screen.
  • I remember hearing a story attributed to Mark Twain (I heard it retold in the science fiction classic film Deep Impact years ago) that riverboat captains along the Mississippi River back in the 1800’s would switch pilots during different parts of their journey upstream or downstream. These pilots would have a clear and extensive knowledge of given sections of the river – where the shallows were located, where the navigable river channel was located, and things of this nature. They would only have knowledge of their given sections of the Mississippi, but not as much for other places.

The idea behind these stories is an idea behind my understanding and approach to setting. Some people might use the metaphor of setting as an iceberg, with sailors traveling on the ocean’s surface only seeing a small percentage of the entire iceberg, with the majority of it hidden beneath the waves.

However, I think a more fitting metaphor for this purpose would be the reader as an explorer in a new land. An explorer enters a new land with either incomplete maps or no maps at all. I see the reader as an explorer in the world you as a fiction writer create. All they know is what they see as they come across it, whether that is locations, those who live there, and the societies they have created. You as the author of this setting is aware of what is in this wider world, but the audience is not.

We’ll get back to this last point in a moment, but let me advise you that in your role as storytellers, you never want to reveal everything about your setting even by the end of your story. First of all, the only way you could even begin to tell all about your setting is with the clunkiest, most awkward info dump which would take up half of the book or story. Secondly, your readers are explorers in the lands you created. They want to discover the lands for themselves. They want to be surprised and amazed, and to be an effective storyteller, you have to give just enough information to inspire them to keep exploring your world, your story.

How much you yourself know about the setting of your story is another issue.

Some writers might choose to only know, or find out about, the parts of a story’s setting a reader will encounter during the course of a story. Others, however, will want to know about all about what that world is. I would count myself among this latter group.

My reasoning is this: you want to see what is behind the curtain and how it works even if your audience doesn’t manage to see this view. You want to be able to see how your world functions so you can represent it accurately. I’m reminded of Alan Rickman acting as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series in strange ways but ways that made sense to him because he knew the whole shape of his world, which included the motivation of his character. That made Alan’s performance5. I want to know every inch of my world. Even though it might take some time, I believe it is time well worth spending.

But…

As with all the advice I give around here, feel free to ignore it if you find it conflicts with writing habits or techniques which actually work for you. The number one piece of writing advice I ever have given my English, composition, and/or special education students is this:

If something is working to help you write well, whether or not it’s the recommended thing to do, keep doing it.

Next Time…

With the new year, I’m going to get into what I consider to be definitely an extension of setting, but is also related in ways to other parts of the prewriting process as well, which I will term world building. This is essentially developing your setting with a par more detailed eye than a simple plan. We’re talking about building an entire history and backstory to your story, which will prove helpful even if your readers only see a fraction of what you eventually develop. I’m looking forward to tackling this.

Hope everyone’s writing is going well. I’ve got the rest of the calendar year off from work, so when I’m not traveling to see family, I’ll be trying to meet my personal writing goals for the year. Just about 10 days left, so it’s going to be a good spring to the end.

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  1. As always, if you can manage a present or future-tense story, go right ahead with it. But I don’t want you to go a step too far if you realize it’s beyond you. Sometimes the old ways are best. ↩︎
  2. I was a bit reluctant to do a “research for fiction writers” post because it can lead into numerous complications, but the further I get along in this series, the more I see the need for it. We’ll get to world building first, however, trust me. ↩︎
  3. And just now, I realize I might have to do a separate post for science fiction world building. Not that it is going to be easy, but then again, most of the good material isn’t. ↩︎
  4. I have a bit of experience on this regarding my most recent writing project, but that’s a story for another Writing Lab. ↩︎
  5. Rest In Power Alan Rickman (1946-2016). ↩︎

On Prewriting, Part 4: Plotting

top view of man putting cards with text of acts of a play on a table

It’s once again time for The Writing Lab, where I try to pass along any insights and advice on the art of writing I’ve picked up during past thirty years or so.

For the past three editions of the lab, I’ve discussed the process of prewriting, the start of the writing process where you begin to develop . After discussing some of the basics behind prewriting, taking a look at how I’ve developed stories over the years, and how to build characters, let’s spend this weekend discussing something a bit controversial – how to develop your story’s plot.

[AUTHOR’S ONGOING NOTE FOR THIS SERIES:] The advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing; however, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well.

On Prewriting, Part 4: A plotline paved with good intentions

red and white map chart
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

The reason I just mentioned the idea of plotting in fiction is controversial is because of a certain division between two different philosophies of dealing with the issue of how to develop the storyline. It’s the difference between “Pantsers” and “Plotters.”

Pantsing vs. Plotting

Although I had heard of these terms years before, I really came into contact with these contrasting styles when I met and joined a now-defunct Des Moines writing group known as the Iowa Writers’ Corner. In our discussions about plotting and how they worked out where their stories were headed, more than a few of my fellow members proudly considered themselves to be pantsers.

Pantsters is shorthand for describing “those who write by the seat of their pants.” The general idea is, they come up with an initial concept and/or general premise, a main character, and then they start writing. And they write, and they write, until they get to the end. The general idea is that they follow the story as it coalesces in their heads and onto the page. They go with the natural flow of the story, and if that path is not so smooth the first time around, well, that’s what the revision process is for.

There are many authors who have this opinion. Stephen King, one of my literary idols growing up, has long been skeptical of laying out how a story is going to go. As he wrote in his memoir/writing advice book On Writing:

I distrust plot…because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. A strong enough situation renders the whole question of plot moot. The most interesting situations can usually be expressed as a what-if question.

(On the other hand, there are some critics who have wondered whether some of King’s novels could have used some more outlining. I will refrain from further comment on the matter, except to say all writers, myself included, have our areas ripe for improvement.)

Then there are the plotters, those who believe you need to have some idea of where you are going before you start down the storytelling road. As you might have sensed, I consider myself to be one of these types of writers, at least to a point.

I can understand the distrust of Uncle Stevie and others of any process that suppresses creativity and spontaneity. However, I think some planning is required, and I’m going to have fun using analogies and/or metaphors to explain my point, heh heh.

I mean, you wouldn’t take a trip from Iowa to San Francisco without having a Rand McNally road map or at least consulting Google’s services. Oh, sure, you might add a restroom or tourist stop or two, you might have to change your path due to construction and the like, but you’d want to have a rough idea of where you are going to go beforehand.

There is just as much artwork in designing and constructing a building as there is writing a story. Anyone would be crazy to not have some blueprints of your prospective home or office building or whatever before construction started. Of course, you’d want to feel free to make changes to those plans if they didn’t work out; for example, if the marble exterior for your skyscraper began breaking off and falling to the ground and you had to swap it out for some other material1.

And finally, I would use an analogy from the world of professional wrestling to make my point, since I have continued to be fascinated with its culture and its storytelling possibilities2. When you are getting ready for a match, you might feel confident enough to call your moves in the ring as they come along, and adapt to both botches and the feedback from the crowd. But you’re always going to know what the finish is going to be.

A Variety of Plotting Plans, or Everyone’s Got Their Own Brand of Kung Fu

In all honesty, there are plenty of ways for you to sketch out the possible courses of your story. There’s a reason why many of these structures and tropes continue to be used repeatedly over the course of Western and other cultures – they tend to work.

And many of them have similar beats. To paraphrase Bruce Lee, many people have their own fighting styles and the names for these styles, but most men and women have the same two arms and two legs, right?

There’s the common three-act structure, which I ended up teaching many of my past English/Language Arts students a few years back.

All credit for this (and other graphics) go to the creators.

There’s the Hero’s Journey described by Joseph Campbell and studied by (among others) George Lucas when he was cooking up Star Wars.

Then there’s the Save the Cat technique, which I learned at a writing conference sponsored by the Midwest Writing Center in the Quad Cities which became a big influence on my own plotting strategy.

And of course, there are many other options out there (or variations on the ones above) for you to find online or explore.

But…

As with all the advice I give around here, feel free to ignore it if you find it conflicts with writing habits or techniques which actually work for you. The number one piece of writing advice I ever have given my English, composition, and/or special education students is this:

If something is working to help you write well, whether or not it’s the recommended thing to do, keep doing it.

Next Time…

I think during the next edition of the Lab in December, we’ll briefly get into some tips on research. I think I can provide some tips in this regard from my experience in journalism, but I also believe you can overthink this process3. After that edition, we’ll get into setting, which will lead us into the wider arena of worldbuilding.

See you down the road.

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  1. This actually happened with the AON Center in Chicago. ↩︎
  2. My obsession with professional wrestling has crept into other portions of my life. I have actually told students that they shouldn’t work themselves into a shoot, or they need to stop acting like everything in their life is a work. Yes, I am the king of inside jokes. ↩︎
  3. As I mentioned before, this series is generally aimed at fiction writing, and the previous statement was made with this in mind. In nonfiction writing, especially regarding historical events, etc., the research process is not just important to the final product, it is essential. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I’ve not been seriously motivated to undertake any major long-form nonfiction writing projects. ↩︎

On Prewriting, Part 3: Character development

brown wooden desk

Hi, and welcome to my writing lab, where I try and rummage through my brain for insights and advice on the art of writing I’ve practiced, both for pay and for fun, for the past thirty years or so.

For the past two editions of the lab, I’ve discussed the process of prewriting, or the essential assembling of ideas and structure that kicks off the entire writing process. After discussing some of the basics behind prewriting and then taking a look at how I’ve developed stories over the years, let’s spend this weekend discussing character development.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE:] While the advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well. You likely will just need to sprinkle some research over it, lol1.

On Prewriting, Part 3: Character Development Bodybuilding in your head

Dogs are friendly souls with emotions who can be dear companions and even family to us, but they’re not reading our stories. As much as the dastardly chat bots and AI entities crawling across the Internet might suck in endless numbers of stories in an attempt to recreated them2, there’s no way they are consuming and enjoying them in the way we do3. In the end, we are homo sapiens writing stories for homo sapiens, so it is only natural for these stories to be populated with humans, or at least characters who are acting like humans. We relate to people and want to see what happens to them. Human or human-appearing characters are at the center of our stories because we want to see people like us and their experiences.

But we don’t want to just meet people. We want to learn about them, follow their stories, root for them. So to do this, as we consider the premises of the stories we tell, we need to know how to create characters we can build stories around.

Molding Characters

You probably have a basic idea of the people who will be part of your story at the beginning when you develop the premise. But as you go further along in the creative process, you get to know these characters better. First you meet them, and then you start to have a dialogue with them, just like meeting real people for the first time. You have to ask them some questions; it’s a getting to know you process.

The question is, what do you need to know about them? What information do you need to know about these characters – especially main characters – to get you interested in them?

Role/Motivation

What role does each of the characters play? Who is your protagonist (the main character)? Who is your antagonist (the one who opposes the main character)4? Is the character a mentor, helper, or love interest5? You might have already sorted this out in the process of coming up with the premise, but you’ll need to solidify it by this point.

You also need to sort out the motivation and goals of your characters, especially your main character/protagonist. We need to know why we should care about them. Oftentimes, you will have a main character with multiple goals and both short and long-term goals.

For example, let’s take the main character of my debut novel, The Holy Fool – newspaper columnist Samuel “Sonny” Turner6. Early in the book, his main motivation, given to him by his mentor, editor Gus Pulaski, is finding out whether the owner of the newspaper he works at, the Chicago Journal, is planning on selling the newspaper to someone likely to strip it for assets. Once he confirms this is, in fact, happening, his focus shifts to seeing if he, with the help of his fellow staff, can possibly stop the sale.

However, it becomes clear that he has other goals, as well. He has what he considers a big story involving the ongoing war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet he finds himself in conflict with both the owner of his paper, who doesn’t see it as a proper story, and with Sonny’s mentor, who sees the value of the story but believes the preservation of the paper should come first. Sonny finds himself becoming attracted to a co-worker even though it is at a turbulent and inconvenient time for him. Meanwhile, in the long-term, Sonny realizes the old ways of journalism he was taught by his mentors are dying out, and he begins to consider whether there might be a better way to report on the world around him than the way he’s always done it. Now we’ve got a bit of complexity around him, something of interest.

However, this can be done just as well around side characters. One example from The Holy Fool was Casey Barnes, an African American employee of the Chicago Journal who works in the newspaper’s Washington, D.C. office. Casey is a lifelong D.C. resident, born and raised. He wants to properly report on his home, in a way that’s authentic rather than glad-handling. So, he avoids the typical D.C. cocktail parties and attempts to gain influence. He talks to the people on the ground, the grunts who make the nation’s capitol work. And through that, he becomes a journalist’s journalist7.

Backstory

For someone who is a massive fan of world-building8, the idea of developing a back story or background for these characters is essential.

I am very much a believer in the “iceberg” concept of back story and background, where you develop a lot of information and story even though the reader might only see five or ten percent of your work, just like ships will only see five or ten percent of the icebergs they have to avoid.

Even if your reader is not quite sure of what a character’s entire story is, and you might never reveal all of this story, it is vitally important you understand what it is so you can fully understand the character, and all of their intricacies. You need to understand what they have gone through, what drives them, and why they seek what they seek. It’s your job as a writer to reveal just enough of this story so they are motivated to see what will happen next.

Personality

What are the strengths and weaknesses of your characters, especially your main characters? To make them realistic, to make them more breathing people and less Mary Sues9, you have to include both.

When I started to put together the idea for my book The Yank Striker, I had a main character, DJ Ryan, who was about as different from me as any character I have ever written. I was inspired by the past athletes, highly successful ones like Michael Jordan and Tom Brady, people who were focused on excellence to the point of obsessiveness, so the idea of having someone who could be successful in one area of their lives while having tunnel vision shutting out other things seemed to fit. And yet, while he’s very successful as a football player, as a soccer player he’s still learning and has to measure himself against opponents with more experience and skills that he doesn’t have. These contradictions can add depth and originality to your characters.

Also, these characters, like actual people, can have true contradictions. While DJ has a problematic relationship with his father, he very much shares his hair-trigger temper. However, while his father’s temper is triggered by disrespect to him, DJ’s is triggered by injustice to other people, especially those who find it difficult to fight back.

Character Arc

Finally, there’s the important character arc, or the progress the character makes toward their goals. What are the internal conflicts (moral choices, ethical quandaries, self-doubts) they have to face? What about external conflicts, like obstacles human or otherwise, that get in their way?

Although we like to talk about positive character arcs, remember the journeys your characters take could be triumphant. They can also be tragic, or even ambiguous. Regardless of the path you choose, you have to have a clear realization or resolution at the end of their story.

Next Time…

Next month, we’ll get into plot development. There are some writers out in the world who believe you should just start writing and follow wherever their whims take them. (I’ll talk about these “pantsers,” as in seat-of-their-pants writers, as part of the next installment.) However, I’m of the opinion you should have a rough idea of where a story is going before you head out onto the story road. We’ll talk about how all the different ways you as a writer can make the journey.

I’ll see you later, then.

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  1. A piece on proper research will definitely have to be a selection for a future Writing Lab piece in this series. Feel free to make any other topic suggestions for a Writing Lab piece in the comments. ↩︎
  2. #copyrightinfringement ↩︎
  3. #bulterianjihad ↩︎
  4. Fun fact – this does not necessarily have to be a human; it could be a force of nature, an aspect of society, or maybe even the protagonist himself if you are really tricky. Just make sure if it’s not human, you throw in some personification to make that non-human being a bit more relatable. ↩︎
  5. For goodness sake, make the love interest their own individual person with their own interests and desires. It shouldn’t be some Manic Pixie Dream Girl creation intended only to support and fuel the protagonist (look the term up, kids). ↩︎
  6. Also the main character of its in-production sequel. ↩︎
  7. He plays a big part in the sequel set in 2024-? (the original is set in 2008-2009). ↩︎
  8. Ohhhh, we’re going to get into it in a later edition of this Writing Lab, trust me. I love building worlds. ↩︎
  9. This is what a Mary Sue is. ↩︎

On Prewriting, Part 2

The Writing Lab, 20 September 2025

Hello! Hope everyone is having a great weekend. It’s once again time for The Writing Lab, where I try and share some insights from writing that I’ve developed from writing, both for pay and for fun, for the past thirty years or so.

It was last month that I began discussing one of the first steps of the writing process – prewriting, where you first generate and develop your ideas, as well as plan out how it will be organized.

With this piece, let’s continue this talk about prewriting by concentrating one of the essential parts of the prewriting process: generating and developing premises for stories. I’ll discuss some ideas about how you might wish to approach this process, using some of my own experiences and processes as examples1.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE:] While the advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well. You likely will just need to sprinkle some research over it, lol2.

A representation of the whole writing process. Note how prewriting is at the start of the process.

On Prewriting, Part 2: Developing your initial premise

It’s somewhat strange to me I often don’t get the question “where do you get your ideas?” It might be because I haven’t been putting my fiction out in public that much until recent years, so I haven’t had the opportunity to get tired of those questions as maybe those who have been in the game longer.

As I mentioned earlier, this part of the advice comes from my experience, which might be much different from yours. Creativity, by nature, if you’re really using it properly3, is a very individual thing. So, to describe the initial part of my creative process, I want to use a very individual metaphor to describe it. The metaphor I think best describes my own creative process is something I call “The Perpetual Stew.”

rustic hot vegetable stew in clay pot
Photo by Selim Alyz on Pexels.com

Perpetual Stew

Back in the day, they had a lot of names for what I call a perpetual stew: forever soup, hunter’s pot, hunter’s stew, and the like. This would go back to the medieval days when people would have a pot like this above a fire or hearth and cooks or whoever was in charge of such things would continually add food and other ingredients to it over days and weeks and even longer, continually adding in and serving out, like you’d hear about in medieval inns and the like. You’d throw in whatever was around or you could harvest at the time: rabbit, hen, pigeon, maybe some pork if you were lucky, grains of course, and whatever vegetables like leeks, cabbage, and other items to flavor up what was in the pot.

Something similar to this is cooking in my head constantly. I end up dumping in whatever I mentally consume, or perhaps gather, into this mental perpetual stew. And I mean everything.

If you don’t know, I have a vast amount of interests and things I learned about during my life. Earlier when I was a kid, I’d dump the whole lore of Star Wars and my love of space Legos in the pot. Over the years, I would add ancient and medieval history and architecture, chess and game theory, 20th century history and culture, the history of 1980’s and 1990’s indie rock in America, professional wrestling throughout the world, bad movies from America, India, and Africa, military tactics and history, 20th century journalism, years of reporting from newspapers and websites, current events, foreign cultures of all kinds, and of course the fiction from 400 to 500 years of Western civilization and beyond. This is among other things, of course.

Eventually, I started to ladle out some servings from this perpetual stew and use it to create some artistic meals. Long ago and back when I was a kid, I took some of those images of Star Wars and the space Legos I played with as a kid and and use it to cook up a sci-fi fantasy space opera long lost to the vagaraties of time and idle thinking. Then there were a few young adult novels, personal obsessions, and teenage-scenarios that got turned into my first manuscript and the one book that got produced as a result of the now defunct National Novel Writing Month (better known as NaNoWriMo). I’m not sure those books will see the light of day because they would need some rewrites and it would be like pretending I was twenty or thirty years old when I was in fact twenty years older. It’s like another person altogether wrote those two books45.

Of course, simply pulling out ingredients from the stew and slopping them together on a plate or in a bowl doesn’t quite work. What I’ve found has worked is when I ask myself questions about what is in the stew or what I want out of it. I’ve found asking these questions helps focus the premises or hooks of my stories clearly enough that it provides at least the skeleton of my tale before I begin drafting.

Asking Questions

question marks on paper crafts
Photo by Leeloo The First on Pexels.com

I’ll give you two examples from my own creative experience. Back in college when I was studying journalism, I learned about an incident that happened at the New York Post in the early 1990’s where the newspaper’s staff was up in arms about the possibility of a shady parking lot mogul buying the paper. Eventually, the paper ran an entire edition about this person, making it clear the staff were not interested in having him for a boss. The incident ended up scaring this buyer off of buying the Post, although the paper eventually wound up in the hands of Rupert Murdoch, which I don’t think was an upgrade.

That story sat in my perpetual stew for a while when one day, I took it out, so to speak, and began asking whether it might be a good basis for a story I’d long wanted to write about the journalism field. That’s when I began asking questions, in the process adding some new ingredients to the new creative meal.

  • What if we set the story in the more familiar location (for me) of Chicago?
  • What if it was set at a declining major newspaper?
  • What if it was happening right during the 2008 presidential elections and the start of the Great Recession, with financial institutions collapsing all around?
  • What if the events of this journalistic revolt ended up with the founding of an American-created, journalistic-focused Wikileaks?

I blended the ideas together, and soon enough, I was writing my debut novel, The Holy Fool. Much more needed to be done in the prewriting, but those questions solidified the premise and much of the action of the story.

More recently, I asked the question, What would my main character and his news organization be doing right around now, in today’s world? And just like that, I had a sequel on my hands.

For my series The Yank Striker, I had my fandom of the sport of soccer and an affection for the Americans who dared to make the sport their profession. It stayed cooking for a while as I gradually added more knowledge of the world of professional soccer in Europe and the US. One day, I had a question:

  • When we finally have an American who can play as well as Lionel Messi, who might that person be? Then I asked:
    • Who would he be?
    • What’s his background?
    • What type of personality would he need to be a true sport superstar (spoiler, a bit obsessed)?

By the end of those questions, I had my main character and the bare frame of what became The Yank Striker series.

Of course, after asking these questions, you still will likely have a long way to go before being finished with the prewriting process. However, you will have a good idea of both the nature of your story, your premise and/or hook, and what you need to find out before drafting out the story.

Next Time at The Writing Lab:

Next month, we’ll get into developing your characters. Every reader is a person, and people are naturally drawn to interesting people in fiction. We’ll discuss what you might need in a main character, as well as supporting characters as well, as well as how they can drive your story as well.

Until then, take care.

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  1. As with all pieces of advice I give here, if you have a better or more effective way of doing some of the things I discuss here, absolutely feel free to stick with your systems. Better yet, message me or share them in the comments so I can “borrow” them. 😅 ↩︎
  2. A piece on proper research will definitely have to be a selection for a future Writing Lab piece in this series. Feel free to make any other topic suggestions for a Writing Lab piece in the comments. ↩︎
  3. That means not using AI to write your bloody stories. What’s the point of creativity otherwise? #ButlerianJihad ↩︎
  4. It might be worth another (or rewritten, depending on how much I’ve discussed the entire story before) Writer’s Biography entry to get into the ins and outs of how it all turned out and why I likely wouldn’t consider trying to release them. ↩︎
  5. Or now that I think about it, maybe I’d release them as web-exclusive stories? Why not make use of stuff I created, even if it’s in a throwaway manner? Why not, indeed, as long as I add the caveat that a kid wrote these books and not the current adult version of me? ↩︎

The Writing Lab, 16 August 2025: On Prewriting, Part 1

photo of pen on top of notebook

Hello everyone out on the Internets. It’s Writing Lab time.

It’s the week I take anything I’ve learned from my thirty or so years working around writing and messing with fiction in my spare time so I can share it with you, my readers.

For the past several editions of this writing lab, I’ve discussed the concept of revision and how it both fits in to the greater writing process and how it can drive your writing. So, I’ve decided to change topics and get into the first part of the writing process – prewriting. Today, I’m going to introduce the topic and get into some of the basic elements of this first part of the writing process.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE:] While the advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well. Frankly, I’ve done enough nonfiction writing in my day professions (journalism and teaching) to limit my nonfiction writing to these blogs.

A representation of the whole writing process. Note how prewriting is at the start of the process.
man and photos on brown corkboard
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

On Prewriting, Part 1: The Basics

The term “prewriting” can be confusing because it implies no writing takes place in this part of the process. This is not the case, although the “writing,” depending on your process, can include a couple lines of scribbled notes or more substancial text. Regardless, since this takes place before you start assembling your rough draft, prewriting makes sense as a term.

In the simplest of terms, prewriting is the process where you formulate and develop the ideas and story you want to write about. This involves creating the characters of your story, especially the main one, establishing the plot and setting of the story, and whatever research you need to complete to make the story seem believable and grounded.

Again, I am just going to review some of the items I believe are essential parts or elements of the prewriting process. My intent is to go into them in far more detail in subsequent Writing Lab posts.

  • Premise: What is the driving idea/what if question/situation that sets off your story? As an ex-reporter, I’m always a believer in the right questions giving insights you wouldn’t expect.
  • Characters: What is needed to create compelling characters? What do you need in a main character (MC) to make them someone a reader wants to invest their time in. How much information is needed for a fully realized MC? By comparison, how much do you need to flesh out supporting characters? Also, do you really need a human antagonist, or is there another solution to this?
  • Plot: What is going to be the storyline of your tale? Is it going to be a conventional three-act story line, or something matching The Hero’s Journey? Or is it going to be something non-linear and unexpected? Is there a good reason for this?
    • This is where some writers divide themselves into “planners” and “pantsers” when it comes to planning, especially in the area of plot. Basically, planners like to sketch things out in advance, where pantsers tend to just start writing immediately after minimal (if any) preparation. I am more of the former than the latter type of writer, but we’ll get into the differences in more detail later.
  • Setting: When and where is your story taking place? For most writers, time might be a straightforward concept, although again you might want to experiment with a more non-linear concept.
    • Place can become more complicated, especially if you choose a setting you, your audience, or possibly both do not have much experience with or connection to. This gets into the whole concept of worldbuilding – constructing both the physical aspects of your world, as well as the non-tangible elements, such as its society and culture (or multiple societies and cultures).
  • Research, which is any self-education you feel you need to be able to tell a realistic story. I always think you need some level of research for any fictional project, whether it involves things you have already learned over the course of your life or it’s new information you need. Even in a story that might seem familiar enough you would not have need additional knowledge, some additional searching can become vital.

The one thing to keep in mind, as with all my writing advice, is that you should proceed with prewriting in whichever way works best for you.

Next Time at The Writing Lab:

On the next writing lab, I’ll get into some of how my own prewriting process works, and one of the most common questions any author gets: “Where do you get your ideas?”

And I know I promised you this before, but I’ll come through next time – there’ll be some stew involved.

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