About the author: Cindy R. Wilson is a YA speculative and contemporary author whose own struggles with anxiety disorder inspired her to write a story with real-life topic readers can relate to. She lives in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and loves using Colorado towns and cities as settings for her stories. She's the mother of three girls who provide plenty of fodder for her YA novels.
I get asked a lot what my plotting process for a story involves, so I'm here today to share what that typically looks like for me.
I've written a lot of stories over the years, and after a while, I started to develop a process that worked for me as I created a story from beginning to end.
The beginning doesn't start with writing, it starts with plotting. I get a story idea. I test it. Testing it means making sure there's a big enough conflict to sustain a whole story with twists and turns. I make sure I know the ending, I make sure I have two or three big plot points, where the story changes in a big way. And then I make sure my characters are in a situation where those twists and turns are going to affect them in a huge way.
Next up comes the playlist. I HAVE to have a playlist first because it helps me as I continue plotting. It helps me figure out who my characters are and what scenes are going to be key scenes for me. Basically, without a playlist, I don't have a story. Then I figure out the characters. I decide on names, I come up with their quirks and likes and dislikes, and I also find pictures to represent them. I make a whole "package" about the book before I even start writing it. This also includes random scenes I want to add, a summary to guide me, and pics to represent a lot of other things in the story—mostly to continue to inspire me. I often make a board on Pinterest for these.
Somewhere during that plotting time, I think of a title. Sometimes it's a working title that'll end up being changed, but it still has to be something I love. It's very, very hard for me to start writing a story without a title—not sure why (I guess I just like to be able to refer to it by title)—so sometimes I'll take a few days to figure this out.
Then, I get to write. My process for this is all over the place, though I try to write as often as possible, usually almost every day until the story is finished. Pretty simple, but it's a process that works for me!