Serpentine Squiggles

This is a bit of a reader response blog now. As has happened not once, but twice before, someone on discord asked me how to write and I spilled a bottle of ink explaining.

This time, a friend asked:

help?
how does one plot a story (or even start)

Now, I have technically written on this topic before, so long time readers of this blog will find this familiar.

Still, “Ur‍-​Development”, in addition to being a pretty bad essay by my new standards, just articulated a theory‍ ‍—‍ not an explanation. It wasn’t a tutorial, and anyone sent to that post for guidance will come away with only a vague understanding of what to do next, if ideally a bit more general understanding (in practice, they’d probabl just be confused).

So that’s what this follow up is for. Let’s put that theory into practice.

If you’ve read any amount of modern writing instruction, you could write this next paragraph yourself, but I feel compelled to add it, if only as ritual.

In the rest of this article, I’m going to make several definite assertions about how best to write and what you want to be doing. I’ll only disclaim here: this is my process, not law, so pick out whatever sounds helpful to you.

And for stuff that doesn’t sound as helpful, it might not work for you‍ ‍—‍ but it still may well be worth trying anyway, just to gather data, since what I do clearly can work, for some value of ‘work’.

With that out of the way, I think the first thing to keep in mind when outlining is that outlining is a form of storytelling. And for our purposes, a telling of a story can be three things: shortened, precise, coherent‍ ‍—‍ pick two.

To be useful as an outline, though, it must be shortened. Thus, everything in your notes exists by virtue of existing either as unworkably vague summation, or as little acontextual fragments of potentially usable prose.

Call these ideas and details. The first thing I’ll tell you is that you’ll want to have a place to put both; they’re both a part of the process.

The second thing to always keep in mind is you don’t want to be outlining. Your goal here isn’t to produce a finished outline‍ ‍—‍ I never have. I finish writing arcs before I finish outlining them. The only rule of writing is tell your story, and you only need enough outline to accomplish that. Or, to play mad libs with a quote:

The primary thing when you take a pen in your hands is your intention to write the story, whatever the means. Whenever you outline, brainstorm, summarize, throw away vomit drafts or pin string to photos on a corkboard, you must write your story in the same movement.

Miyamoto Musashi (not really)

Put more soberly, it’s worth elaborating that outlining can solve three problems, mainly:

  1. “But I have no idea what to write.”
  2. “But I don’t know if my ideas will hold up.”
  3. “But I don’t know what I’ll need later.”

In some ways these are expressions of the same problem, but to illustrate each, say you wanted to tell the story of a sad swordswoman who goes to slay the ghost queen who haunts the moon.

Problem type 1 is writing a few chapters then realizing:

okay, but how even does my wandering swordswoman get from wandering in bumbledum nowhere to being anywhere near the moon ghost?

Problem type 2 would be writing out the story, and then as you get near the grand confrontation you realize:

wait, why does she even want to slay the moon queen?

Problem type 3 is getting the scene where she ascends from the earth to the moon via a ritual teleportation circle and realizing:

fuck, it sure would be nice if i had ever mentioned ritual circles existed anytime before now. without that, this is kinda cheap

In sum, you might outline:

And it’s important to be aware of what problem you’re specifically trying solve when you outline.

For example, a problem of type 3 (what if I need setup later?) is a bit less important (or at least different in form) if you’re writing fanfiction, where you have plenty of characters and worldbuilding and plot points to draw upon whenever you need, and the general space of what can be done is established.

Problems of type 2 (what if plot holes?) aren’t important if you’re writing a simple story where this problem is unlikely‍ ‍—‍ after all, it’s much more likely a murder mystery falls apart than a slice of life story.

And problems of type 1 are less of an issue in episodic stories, or stories where the logistics of “how do I even get from A to B” aren’t as daunting in scope due to genre or plot/setting. Contrast a continent‍-​spanning fantasy adventure to a superhero story set in one city.

You could be skeptical of this focus on specific problems, of saying essentially, it’s okay to have no idea what you’re writing if you think you can get away with it. Some, I’m sure, accept the dichotomy between planners and “pantsers”, architects and gardeners, narrativists and simulationists, or however many other ways you can express this genre of distinction.

But still, isn’t it always better to do more planning, if you can? Sure, some people lose motivation to work on their story if they plan too much, or feel they can’t faithfully write their characters if they know what’s going to happen.

But, and forgive the rudeness, is this not a skill issue? Maybe some people aren’t cut out for planning, but this isn’t an argument that planning isn’t strictly better.

As a certain writing youtuber asks: can gardeners do anything that architects can’t? To quote from a comment I left on that video:

Fundamentally, the limitation on every outline is that the map is not the territory. You can have detailed plan, but the story you’re writing can’t be fully characterized by the plan, or that plan would be the story (anything else you’d add is by definition unnecessary).

There must be details you haven’t worked out, and those details, some of them, must be crucially important, or there’s no need to go into detail. There will be turning points, critical moments, where a single gesture from a character or the phrasing of a short line of dialogue could shape scenes or entire arcs. (All for want of a nail, you’ve heard it before.)

So it’s entirely possible that, after planning out the entire alphabet, you get into the weeds and find that the path from A to B or J to K isn’t as smooth as you’d want it to be. Most of the time, it’s well within your abilities as a writer to course correct, tweak a few things so that the path from there is at least as smooth as you could make.

However, if you had been gardening, would those weeds have been so troubling? Without an outline, when just improvising, you can simply go in the most natural seeming direction right away, rather than having to twist and contort paths so that they bend towards the destination you already have in mind.

If the benefits of outlining is consistency and purpose, then the benefits of writing is flow, and that’s what draws us into a story and keeps us enthralled in the first place. Outlines are global, but stories are read locally. Ultimately, the thing outlines get you is avoiding the possibility that down the line, there’s something you’ll think of later that you wish you thought of earlier.

And the thing not outlining gets you is kind of identical, isn’t it? When you’re in the guts of a scene, feeling your characters’ minds vividly and able to clearly see the layout of the room in your mind, when the vibes are firing on all cylinders, you just might think of something that makes a lot more sense, that you’ll wish you thought when you were planning this all out, but there’s too much planning you can’t scrap now.

You might think this is an overall lesser concern‍ ‍—‍ after all, in the worst case, if the thing you thought is so compelling, you can just change your outline, and that’s certainly less work that having to rewrite the whole story because you improvised your way into a plot hole.

But I’m not sure it’s so simple. How much of what you’ve written until now has been invested in setting up things later in the outline? How pointless will it be if you can’t follow through on the promises you were making, just because a better idea occurred to you?

I’m not the biggest fan of just blithely going “both sides are the same, everything is perfectly balanced and nothing is better than anything else”, but I think it’s entirely possible to outline your way into plotholes, albeit of different type (and perhaps overall lesser in quantity and severity?) than the ones you might improvise your way into.

And you need to be aware of that. Don’t outline because you think stories should be outlined, outline to solve problems. With every pen stroke, you must write your story.

But this is all preface, isn’t it? You’ve scrolled one third down the page and I haven’t even started talking about how to outline

(Still, I think understanding the “why” solves much of the problem of “how”.)

Suffice it all to say, then, if you want to outline, your first step should be to ask yourself:

And you might be expecting a third question here, but there isn’t really a test for the last issue. Problems of type 3 are purely polish and foresight. (And, of course, pacing). More setup is usually better, but it isn’t always necessary, and if it is necessary, it means the second question should have caught it as a logical error. This is the area where outlining is a bit of an indulgence, in my opinion, and has diminishing returns for story quality.

At certain point this level of planning becomes just a way for an author to flex.

Once you have your problem in front of you, the next step is to spin your brain wheels and brainstorm ideas. I can’t explain this to you, or at least I won’t in this article. I assume you’re here because there’s a story you want to tell. You should, y’know, want to tell it, be excited about it. You have cool ideas you want to share. Very rarely have I encountered people whom not having cool ideas was the barrier to them writing.

So, what’s important to note is that this process of brain spinning should generate some ideas you can put in the “main” outline, and some random details you’ll want to tuck away for later.

There’s no clear structure to give to the details, in my experience, but they are the life of the project. They’re the cool bits you’re dying to get to, the stuff that’ll make the readers go “ooh”. You’ll want to keep them around somewhere where you can regularly review them, to keep them fresh, to motivate and inspire you. And so you don’t forget them!

To reuse metaphor, these are like little idea‍-​spores that will get moldy (in a good way) and grow and link together.

I can, however, tell you about structuring the main outline

You can tell a whole lot of stories with a template like this:

In [your setting], there is a [character]. Every day they [expression of need; or stability]. Until one day, [opportunity to fulfil need; or a threat that disrupts their stability].

They want to [pursue this opportunity; or nullify this threat], despite [limitations, requisites, or conditions that complicate this]. Eventually they find [possibilities, workarounds, or new perspective].

Given [these limitations and possibilities], they must [chose between difficult options; or present an unexpected solution to a seemingly impossible problem]. Finally, their choice [has consequences, tradeoffs, or side‍-​effects] and ever since, [transformation of their character or those around them].

But at last, [result of their striving, be it success or failure].

(This is essentially Harmon’s story circle.)

But maybe you don’t like the feel of a template. You could instead try to answer these questions. For me, it helps to pretend you’re writing a message to a friend on discord. Or even actually write a message to a friend on discord.

  1. Who is this story about? Why are they so interesting?
  2. What’s their problem? Why do we want to read a story about someone dealing with that? What does the problem do that makes it such a problem?
  3. How does this problem get solved? Is that an interesting solution?
  4. Why can’t they just solve their problem at the start of the story? Does that make sense?
  5. Why can they solve their problem at the end of the story? What have they changed?
    (Invert these questions if e.g. writing a tragedy)
  6. Why do they need to solve this problem now? Why can’t this story have happened twenty years ago, or happen a few months from now?
  7. What’s the state of the problem after they enact their solution‍ ‍—‍ is it a clean fix? Are there side effects? What did they win?
  8. What’s the cost of their solution. What have they lost, how have they changed?
  9. Where does that leave things?

A sufficiently detailed, believable answer to these question is the story you’re trying to write. But when you first answer them, it probably won’t be. It’ll still be just an outline (or a temporarily embarrassed draft, if you will). It’s missing something. Is it vague, or is it incomplete?

Most of these questions are fairly easy to write serviceable paragraph summaries for, but the real story happens in between 4 & 5. The problem of the outline is figuring out how to go from saying “here’s what they need to do” to just saying “they did it.”

What’s useful in separating out what must have changed between start of the story and the end, is that every one of those reasons can themselves be analyzed as subproblems via the same diagnostic questions. In this way, you could recursive establish everything you need to write in what order for your story to fly.

I normally don’t do fully worked out examples in my articles, but it feels appropriate to illustrate here, this being a tutorial and all. Let’s put some bones on that example from so far up the page above us.

  1. Who is this about?

    Our protagonist is the daughter of a comet and the farmer who tended the fields it had cratered into. Perhaps she needs to wield a sword to channel her magic cometspawn powers.

  2. What’s the problem?

    With every rise of the full moon, terrible storms arise from the sea and assail the land. With each storm, our cometspawn protagonist grows more powerful and the townfolk begin to think she’s to blame, somehow.

  3. How can it be solved?

    When the ghost of the last queen of the stars is banished from the moon and put to rest, the storms will cease and the cometspawn can know peace.

  4. Why not already?

    The cometspawn has no idea there even is a ghost in the moon, and the lore of the kingdom of the stars has been lost.

  5. When can she do it?

    With every storm, she grows more powerful and begins to see visions of the past.

  6. Why start now?

    How about: a cometphobic priest has sent word to a local lord who will raise an army against the cometspawn, she’s forced to flee from town to town, evading suspicion and staying ahead of pursuit, wandering as a knight errant.

    Or maybe a second comet has fallen, and where her mother was left completely weakened, dying just years after falling in love, this comet is larger, powerful, and evil. She has to defeat the evil comet and through this, she learns more about the stars.

  7. What does it achieve?

    The moon ghost can just barely be defeated by a cometspawn at peak power, and she is untrained in her abilities. Then, after slaying the evil comet and promising to kill the moon, our cometspawn becomes regarded as a hero by the people of the bumbledum republic. The storms wane, with no more moon magic to sustain them.

  8. What does it cost?

    Even at the height of her power, the cometspawn can only ascend to the moon via an esoteric teleportation circle deep within an ancient ruin made perilous by foul magic. Once the moon ghost is slain, magic will be drained from the moon, dimming its light, and she will have no way to teleport back.

  9. Where does that leave us?

    Trapped on the moon, the comet spawn must either descend to earth the hard way‍ ‍—‍ burning up on reentry, partially or even completely destroyed on the way down‍ ‍—‍ or forsake the earth and wander the stars the way she once wandered the kingdoms of earth.

I think that’s a neat story online, don’t you?

Already, I can look at it and think of places to expand. Obviously I’m drawn to fleshing out the magic system, but even plot wise, I wonder just what the motivations and interactions would be with that evil comet, with that angry priest. And how many towns does she visit? Who are the allies she finds on her quest?

I have a little rule of three I like to apply when expanding stuff. For every sentence in the original summary, I try to turn it into three sentences. One sentence of “lead in” that primes or sets up the original, one sentence that’s a refined to be more detailed and specific, and one sentence that follows through with at least one consequence. Signify, reify, ramify.

The theory is that diligently following this rule, I could recursively flesh out a whole story. but that’s just theory; it’s never worked.

Moreover, what I find as I try to expand stuff like this is that this structure starts to really buckle with just one or two levels of recursion

When you think about it, this bulleted list just isn’t shaped like a story, and it becomes more and more noticeable as you inflate it with words. It feels to story almost what a color palette is to a painting, or unedited film to a movie. Those are both bad metaphors in impressively opposite ways, and I don’t think I’ve said more than repeating “it’s the wrong shape”, really.

But anyway, for these reasons, I’ve sort of organized writing into five distinct stages. I’ve never been so organized that I can confidently say I’ve ever actually done all five in sequence. (Maybe you can argue that some of them are internally represented in how I think about writing, but that verges on unfalsifiable.)

Let’s get into it.

Stage 1 is the concept. This is just a few sentences, a paragraph at most. I find Jim Butcher’s concept of a ‘story skeleton’ a decent jumping off point, but I like to append a sentnece

When [something happens], [your protagonist] [pursues a goal]. But will they succeed when [antagonist provides opposition]? Only when they [character development] can they [achieve a resolution].

This probably should have been the first thing I mentioned, but honestly, this ordering reflects how I approach it? I typically figure out my plot pretty well through intuitive methods, and then I come back and boil it down to this one sentence summary, rather than coming up with a summary and working from there.

Being able to distill it down to a point is helpful to keep the most important bits in mind, and focus on what the core of your story is. I tend to keep a summary of the current arc near the top of my document most of the time, rereading it often.

I’m gonna keep this magic sword woman story going until it becomes unfeasible, so here:

When magical storms besiege a kingdom, a swordswoman born of a comet demands to know why she draws power from them. But will she live to find answers when ignorant clergy call for an inquisition against her? Only when she accepts her nature as a comet will she find answers lies in her mother’s past and the stars beyond.

This could be honed a bit, but I’m just spitballing here.

Perhaps at this point I’m indulging, but maybe it’ll be instructive to view a stage 1 overview of an actual story, and one more complex than this cliche fantasy I made up on the spot. Now, this isn’t the real summary of the upcoming arc of A Chimerical Hope, but it’s close. (It’s an edit I made after I realized, as you may have, that these “story skeletons” tend to sound a lot like what you’d see on a book’s blurb. So I vague‍-​ified some spoilers out of my overview as an experiment.)

Just as Team Duskborn returns to the shelter of civilization, a cryptic murder committed right outside of Wisterun has their plans unraveling. With this death, the riverside town reels in the ensuing uncertainty and danger.

Underneath it all are conspiracies and secret machinations that squirm to remain in shadow. With Awelah’s violent impatience, Ooliri’s lack of confidence; and Makuja’s callous distance, they’ll never solve this mystery as they are. But when Yanseno promises to train them for the town’s defense, they may learn than mere skill from this village.

A storm is coming, and a little girl is alone in a vast, dark lake, crying, soon to drown.

As you can see, I’m overall a lot less spare with it than Butcher advises, and warp the structure to suite my ends.

Anyway, what comes next is Stage 2: the overview. This is where I take the text of the story concept and perform the first pass of that recursive ‘one sentence into three sentences’ algorithm. This should ideally produce a fairly broad but tightly structured summary of what happens with story, essentially a synopsis. if the stage 1 concept was a paragraph, this should be a page or two, depending on how complex it is.

The goal here is to take the story pieces you already have‍ ‍—‍ problem statement, main character, climatic decision, etc.‍ ‍—‍ and hinge them together into something that logically flows, if vaguely. A view from fifty feet; rather than a list like before, the result is a sketch of the story’s progression.

The next arc of chimhop is too complex (and more importantly, complete spoilers) to get into here, but I can do something simple with the moon sword story.

Raised on a farm with only wistful tales of her mother, Aurora believed herself a normal girl with feelings she couldn’t explain. Her world is thrown into stark uncertainty when a winter solstice’s full moon stirs within her the glow of unknown power, leaving her room of the farmhouse in ruin. Her father refuses to explain, if he even could, as though refusing to delve back into old memories‍ ‍—‍ so she travels to a nearby village for answers.

As months go on, she overhears stories of wild magical storms, which rain down strange flesh‍-​rending crystals or bring winds that howl like mind‍-​maddening sirens‍ ‍—‍ and with each full moon, she once again glows with more power, and each time the destruction she wreaks seems to worsen. Until, at the village’s edge, she finds a retired knight willing to instruct her in the art of the sword. Channeling her magic through a sword provides an outlet for the storm of energy swirling inside of her.

But the storms only get worse, and Aurora’s growing power does not escape the notice of others in the village. A friar from the faith of earth and sun is clever enough to figure out what the mystic knight had also deduced: Aurora’s mother was a living comet fallen from the skies above. The faith of earth and sun believe these hybrid beings to be a curse: and what else could explain these evil storms? To the friar, it’s clear there is only one cure to this plague.

The mystic knight helps her flee the village before the minister’s inquisition can find her. Between the mercenaries hunting them, the perils of the wild and the storms growing ever more malicious, the old, retired knight can’t handle the trials of the adventuring life, and won’t last long. Before he wears down to the end, he tells Aurora of a story: of how there once were entire kingdoms of cometspawn, and how a mad queen so filled with hate had devised the magic to rend those kingdoms to dust with the elements‍ ‍—‍ how the very people who blamed Aurora for these storms are cut from the same cloths as the ones truly responsible for them. He doesn’t know what the true origins the storms are, but he tells her enough that Aurora knows to seek the lore of the mad queen.

The knowledge that she isn’t responsible fills her with determination, and inspires her to break from the secrecy and hiding the knight had urged for them. She now walks in the open, protecting and helping the people of the republic even as she runs from the minister’s inquisition. The hope is that her example inspires doubt in word of the clergy that demonizes her, and it does win her allies‍ ‍—‍ but the storms only grow more violent, and it soon begins to feel as if they’re following her. It becomes clear that rescuing and helping rebuild from the storms isn’t enough. She needs to stop them at the source.

Aurora tracks down the queen’s old castle, and the finds the ritual circle of ascension the queen used to extract and transport her spirit to the moon. This process left her reduced to nothing but a shadow of herself, but because Aurora is cometspawn rather than human, her soul is of a different form and she can make the trip at no injury to herself.

On the moon, Aurora finds the queen a wailing, tragic specter, yet only magnified in power by the latent magic of the moon. The sun streaks across the skyless space above them throughout their battle, and it takes everything that Aurora learned from the knight and her wandering journey to even survive, but she’s unable to best her. It’s only by discarding her sword and releasing unchanneled magic‍ ‍—‍ visiting upon the moon the very same destruction the queen had wielded‍ ‍—‍ that she’s able to stagger the queen enough to land a killing blow.

With the queen dead, and untouched peace returned to the skies of earth, Aurora has saved the day, but what of herself? The queen hadn’t, couldn’t, devise a way to descend back to her kingdom, and now none of her intellect remains to probe the problem. Aurora could fly down as a comet, burn up on re‍-​entry, and allow whatever remnant could survive of her to return to the earth, to live or be buried with the people she loved. Or, turning her gaze to the stars beyond, she could instead fly far away, seek others of her mother’s kind, and wander the stars as she wandered the kingdom’s of earth.

As she contemplates, the world turns.

I rushed that, a little bit, though it’s hard to tell with how long it ended up anyway. I cut out some parts (you can see the evil comet and the visions of the past didn’t make it into this draft), and I refrained some of the ideas I had.

For one, I considered a spooky sorcerer who, friend or foe, lead to Aurora discovering the queen’s castle; I also considered giving the queen more depth, arranging things for a classic “join me, hero” beat before the big fight, or even setting her up to be a truly tragic character, as I originally conceived, rather than a genocidal maniac. (Did the queen know Aurora’s mother before her fall, for instance?)

Ultimately, I think this summary is actually too long and overdetailed for an overview, but I excuse it here because it’s where I worked out some of the lore. (And I’m deliberately not really editing the moon sword stuff to save myself work). I suppose it’s honest to paint this process as organic as it actually is: you won’t get a nice, sterile 9 sentence overview, and it’s not better if you do.

The stuff I cut out can be added later in the outlining process, which I suppose it’s time to get on with describing.

So, stage 3, the golden core formation elaboration is where things switch up. You see, by this point, your idea‍-​spores should have such thick roots that you’re noticing distinct subplots and arcs clumping together in your summary. This would make things messy if you took your overview and tried to recursively expanding like how we (purportedly) expanded an overview out from the concept.

Instead, what I do at this juncture is start pulling things apart. I set aside arcs and subplots as distinct threads, and summarize them individually, as if they were their own overviews.

Remember that distinction I keep bringing up (and not doing all that much with, tbh), between ideas and details? Stage 3 is where that distinction starts to really break down. Your outline becomes complex enough to fracture into multiple pieces. These threads will essentially stand side by side with the various fragments and jotted down details you have littering the rest of your document.

As you work on them in tandem, sometimes the details will expand enough that they get promoted to being threads of their own, and details and vague idea‍-​clumps will cross‍-​pollinate and connect in unexpected ways. There’s not a lot of wrong ways to proceed here, as long as you’re always adding and reviewing the ideas in your documents. And with every movement, writing a little more of your story.

So, for the moon sword fic, it’d make sense for everything from the beginning to them leaving the village to be sectioned out as its own thread. There’d be threads for Aurora’s episodic adventures wandering across the republic, depending on how long I would want this story to be.

There’d be a thread for the backplot‍ ‍—‍ telling the story of what the hell happened with the bad queen so I can keep the timeline and causality straight. Depending on how hard I dive into the magic system, another thread looking specifically at the protagonist’s power development might be in order.

In a way, you could view this all as outlining each major subunit as a story in their own right.

(If another example is in order, I could mention how I organize things for chimhop. I have a thread for how the investigation will unfold; a thread for the how the relationship with and defense of the town goes; and I kind of stalled out at this point (a sign that my process needs some improvement, here), but I think each co‍-​protagonists‍ ‍—‍ the mini‍-​arcs of awelah/makuja/ooliri‍ ‍—‍ each merit their own threads, for example.)

How long stage 3 lasts depends a lot on how ambitious your project is. I haven’t even tried to outline in detail my plans for the entirety of A Chimerical Hope, and I’m a little daunted by how many fractally recursive threads might result from such an endeavor.

Something like this little moon sword demo, though, could be less ridiculous in scope. I think I could reasonably expect perhaps a dozen sub‍-​components of story worth dissecting as distinct anatomical units, enough to cover the arcs of major characters, the subplots that might arise in various towns along Aurora’s journey.

Finally, once all the individual subplots and/or arcs have been well‍-​structured in isolation, stage 4 would be arrangement, to borrow a term from musical scores. This is where those threads get re‍-​woven together into a form that can be parsed and digested by a reader. This is where you worry about pacing, and note down the scenes you expect to write, and in general, you must grapple with how the story will flow beat by beat on the page.

When I initally wrote this article, I didn’t have much to say about this. For many of my stories, I didn’t do any arrangement explicitly. Arrangement (and even elaboration, to a large extent) happened all in my head, in the form of 4d dimensional narrative hyperobjects being rotated in the densely wrinkled folds of my brain.

I make this shit up as I go along, basically.

(To an extent, this has changed as I’ve written more‍ ‍—‍ there is a new article about writing scenes which covers arrangement in detail. Indeed, the methods explained in that new article work well enough I wonder if I would omit elaboration entirely. Certainly, I may end up rethinking its structure.)

But to describe what I used to do, when the elaborations of different threads align enough that I have a pretty good idea for which scene needs to be written next and what needs to happen within it, I get up from my computer, grab a nicely bouncy ball, and start walking.

I’ll walk for an hour or two, daydreaming and brainstorming about the scene to come, mentally arranging the narrative orchestra, and when I come back from the walk, I usually have come up with a striking opening line that will thrust the reader immediately into the drama that’s about to unfold.

Another way to look at it, really, is that you can go through these different stages asynchronously‍ ‍—‍ and indeed you have to, if you’re writing a big serialized project like most webfiction believes it has to be. You nail down the concept enough that you can give an overview of one arc. You elaborate the arc thread by thread until you know enough to arrange one chapter. And once you have an arrangement for one scene, I find it’s waste of time to actually write it out, rather than treating it as internal, intermediate representation for the next stage:

Stage 5 is, of course, the composition. Once you’ve synthesized and arranged everything, the last thing left to do is the hard work of actually envisioning and wordsmithing the dialogue and internal thoughts and description that being everything flowing to life.

And then comes the dreaded editing. But neither composition nor editing is what we’re here to talk about today in the slightest. (Though I might suggest my articles on fleshing out scenes, or show don’t tell specifically as starting points for stages 5 & 6.)

Beyond that… I don’t think there’s much left for me to say. There’ll be more essays and principles to expound upon, but until then, write your damn story.