Season 1 Episode 3: How Much Do You Need to Know Before You Start Writing?
Season 1, Episode 3
How much you need to know before you start writing depends on how you're wired, not on whether you call yourself a plotter or a pantser. LoreKeepers need it all mapped — the killer, the clues, how many red herrings. Mythmakers should deliberately underbuild, because they go cold once there's nothing left to discover. Heartweavers build the world through their characters' eyes and can skip most of the rest. Wildscribes need dense sensory detail but flexible paths through it.
Show notes:
Every outlining class teaches you how to brainstorm. Almost none of them ask how much detail you personally need before the writing starts — and getting that wrong is why a perfectly good outline can kill a book.
In this episode I go House by House: what fuels each one's ideas, how much world-building each needs before chapter one, and the specific trap each one falls into. Including the one I got wrong for years with Wildscribes, and the authors I cost because of it.
In this episode:
Why the plotter/pantser argument is the wrong question
LoreKeepers: everything mapped first, and the trend-mistaken-for-trope trap
Mythmakers: two fuel sources, and why you should underbuild on purpose
Heartweavers: the wound transformation as the engine, and skipping the science
Wildscribes: dense detail, flexible paths — the thing I got backwards
Why Wildscribes and LoreKeepers are more alike than you'd think
Hybrids, and what your stress response tells you about your dominant House
Questions Authors Ask Me About Brainstorming
How much should I outline before I start writing?
It depends on your wiring, not on a rule. Some writers need the whole thing mapped — every clue, every red herring — and write beautifully inside those boundaries. Others go cold the moment there's nothing left to discover. Matching the detail level to how you actually work matters more than the outline's quality.
Do I have to build the whole world before chapter one?
No, and for some writers it actively hurts. If your engine is a character's transformation, you need boundaries and limits, not physics. Borrow the science that's already been established, spend your energy on how your characters experience the world, and let the restrictions become plot.
Why do I get bored with my own book halfway through?
Often because you built too much up front. If discovery is part of what fuels you, a fully specified world removes the thing that keeps you writing. Build enough to start, and leave yourself something to find in chapter twelve.
Am I a plotter or a pantser?
That's the wrong axis. The useful question is how much detail you need before you can move, and what happens to your energy once you have it. Two writers can both outline heavily and need completely different things inside the outline.
Transcript — Season 1, Episode 3
Hello, and welcome. Today we're talking about ideation. How do we come up with all these fantastic story ideas, and how do the different Houses do it?
Here's the thing I keep tripping into. I'm not actually teaching how to do the things, because a lot of us have written many books and we already know how. What we haven't figured out is how to do it to our own blueprint.
That's my entire focus. Not how do you brainstorm, or how do you write books. How do you do it in a way that actually works with you.
I've been doing this for twenty-four years and studying people for longer than that, so this is a lot of fun for me. I hope it's fun for you too.
Why outlining classes don't cover this
There are plenty of classes on how to outline. I teach some of them, because I did that work for years and I did it well.
Okay — marginally well. It depends who you ask. There were authors I succeeded wildly with. There were authors I succeeded marginally with. And there were a few who were basically going, Frankie, I don't even know what you're doing right now.
When you're a service provider doing work for another author, you have to figure out how your personality works with theirs. Writing outlines for someone is almost like ghostwriting, except you're ghostwriting in their language.
There are very successful outliners still in business who have figured out exactly who they work best with, and they've just collected those people. Bees knees. That's the way to do it.
But the thing nobody really talks about is brainstorming.
People mention it, sure. And depending on what you're writing — romance, epic fantasy, sci-fi, mystery, thriller, contemporary, historical — there are varying degrees of brainstorming and research and just understanding what you're about to write, so you can tell the story as efficiently as possible.
But this idea that you need every detail from the absolute beginning is a false narrative.
I'm not saying everyone's pushing that. We've got the pantsers going grab as little as you can, just enough to get moving, and go. And we've got the people saying get all of it, because you don't want to be discovering this while you write. And there's the whole range in between.
That range is what we're talking about. How do ideas generate for you, how do you brainstorm, and what level of definition do you actually need?
LoreKeepers
Let's start here, because I'm gathering more LoreKeepers now and I'm excited about it.
Every single time I talk to them, they say: why do I sound so boring?
Dude. How can you think you're boring when you're the author everybody else wishes they were more like? So many of us are just trying to succeed, and LoreKeepers have it built into their DNA. That's a superpower. That is not something to feel guilty about.
On the brainstorming side: an idea comes to you, and then you research whether it has validity. Is this marketable? Will it hit my goals? If yes, you do a pile of market research to see what everybody else is doing. Trends versus tropes.
And you follow tropes, because trends aren't bankable and you know it.
Some of us get very excited about the trend train because ooh, shiny squirrel. And you're going, no. That's a shiny squirrel. I'm not investing serious energy in something that may not exist by the time I finish this book.
You can produce regular words, which makes you a consistent author who can bank on a schedule. But maybe you're not one of the fastest, because you work during the day, or you have a toddler, or two toddlers and a husband. Who knows what you've got.
Poor husbands. They get so much slack from me. Any partner, honestly.
Whatever's eating your time and your creative power, sometimes you sit down and there's nothing in the tank. Because even LoreKeepers run out of gas. That's real.
The difference is that the ritual you build puts gas back in the tank. That right there is the superpower the rest of us wish we had, because not everybody gets that.
The thing I noticed writing outlines for LoreKeepers is that they needed all the information before they sat down. If it was a mystery, they needed to know who the real killer was, what every clue would be, what the red herring was going to be — and whether there'd be one or two.
And don't get too creative about it. Because the best way to get words done every day is to stay focused. You read me? Yes ma'am, loud and clear.
When I say don't get creative — LoreKeepers are very creative people. They're just extremely good at setting boundaries, making sure there's enough room inside them to succeed, and then staying inside them.
The trap. If they misread a trope — if it was actually a long trend rather than a true trope — and they've built an entire series around it, that hurts. Some trends look like they're gaining real momentum, and they do, and authors make good money on them. And then readers go: you know what, I've read so many reverse harems. Today I'd like to choose.
Reverse harem isn't as hot as it was. There are still authors writing them, not making what they used to, with readers who've petered out a little.
So for a LoreKeeper: how long has this actually been running, and how long do I project it lasts? Sometimes that's hard to call.
The LoreKeeper says, these are my boundaries, this is the path I made, and it's ride or die.
Mythmakers
Mythmakers are interesting because they have two energy sources.
One is the work itself — the research. My God, they get excited about research. I've never seen anyone light up like that, and I see it over and over.
The other fuel is discovery while writing.
So the Mythmaker wants to create a very, very detailed world. When you're reading a series and the world is enormous, with multiple invented languages people actually speak — not ones you can Google translate, I mean elven and alien and dwarven — and there's that much history and lore, those are typically Mythmaker books.
A lot of Mythmakers get their energy from building that. They're inspired to create a world by a justice rally cry. What would the world be like if all my readers just understood this one thing? And then they build a whole series around it.
What if my readers understood that racism is bad. Okay, that's an easy example and it's been done. But it's real. I've seen it in so many series. There was an experience they had or witnessed, and it became the cry, and then they built a world out of it.
And then they want every detail for that book or series specified. And then they get bored midway through.
Sometimes not even midway. Sometimes after chapter three.
The Mythmaker and the Wildscribe are similar there — both get bored easily.
So in brainstorming, I strongly recommend Mythmakers don't overbuild. Build just enough that while you're writing you can discover things and go, oh my God, this is so cool. I cannot wait to see how October handles this.
October's a character of mine. I'm not just naming months at you.
If we can pull Mythmakers out of their websites and their spreadsheets and their funnels and get them into their books, they generate energy by writing — as long as they're still discovering the details of the thing they built.
Heartweavers
My Heartweavers. Oh my God.
When I was doing outlines, my Heartweavers got tripped up if I built worlds for them, and tripped up if I didn't. It took me forever to work out what was happening — and not because Heartweavers are slow. That's not what I'm saying at all. It took me a while to understand how they see world-building.
Which is strange, because I'm a Heartweaving Mythmaker. You'd think I'd have known. Obviously not.
The Heartweaver's fuel is not a justice cry and it is not a marketing goal. It's the wound transformation.
Every story has to have a wound transformation. A heart transformation. A soul call that moves the story.
Once you see it that way: you create your characters, you understand your characters, and you build the world through their eyes. You only need this much information.
Say you're a Heartweaver writing sci-fi. First of all, that sci-fi is going to be really cool and I want to read it. Second — the big stuff, how the solar system works, how the ships work? You don't need it.
You need to know what it feels like. The reaction to what's happening. Because that's what restricts what your characters can do, and those restrictions become plot.
You don't need the science behind it. You can say, I saw this in Star Trek, I'm using that. It's already been established, people already believe it, and that's fine. That's absolutely fine.
A Heartweaving sci-fi writer will not write the same story as a Mythmaking sci-fi author — who does need all of it, as does a LoreKeeper. Both of them want the actual science of gravity.
Which is funny, because I'm a Heartweaving Mythmaker and my husband is a Wildscribe, and we're writing a sci-fi together, and we bicker about the science constantly. I want the science. I'll go do a deep dive on physics. Am I a physicist? No. Do I think it's cool? Absolutely. I'm an expert for three days and then it falls out of my head and I can't remember how gravity works.
And he says: I don't care about that. I want magic gravity.
Heartweavers sit in between. They don't want to be overwhelmed by world-building detail, but they still need the boundaries — the things that limit them as they work — because they need to focus their world-building around how their characters see it, experience it, and react to it.
Capture those reactions. Those matter.
Wildscribes
The Wildscribe's fuel is trust, and their inspiration is usually a justice rally cry. They experienced something, they felt slighted by it, and they'll build entire series around that feeling and seek justice for it.
There are two kinds. The feeling kind, where there's a sense of betrayal. And the thinking kind, where it's a different flavor — a sense of broken justice.
Their stories are sensory-driven and experience-driven.
And here's what's strange to me. Because Wildscribes need so much flexibility in how they write, I assumed they needed to discover as they went. So let's not do any world-building.
Oh my God. I did not realize how badly that would land.
I screwed up some Wildscribe authors. I said, we don't really need world-building for you, here's your outline — and they looked at it and said, what do you want me to do with this?
The discovery is different for them.
They need the details of the place they're going to be in. What they need flexibility on is which path they take through it.
What they don't need is to discover what the path looks and feels like while they're walking it. They need the sensory information. They need the history. They need to know why that door is magically closed, and that it will open to their hand — but only if they're in true alignment with themselves.
I got that wrong so many times, because I thought Wildscribes and Mythmakers were similar.
No. The Wildscribe and the LoreKeeper are the most similar in terms of fuel. They're both trust builders, and they both need a lot of detail in order to write. What's different is how they produce. The LoreKeeper can produce every single day. The Wildscribe needs all the connections they've made during the day, the week, the month, the year, before they can write that particular scene whole.
I love that each House brainstorms a little differently.
If you're a hybrid
One House is going to be slightly dominant.
Every time I take a personality test I come out fifty-fifty INTJ/INFJ, so I'm fifty-fifty Mythmaker and Heartweaver. But when I'm in a state of trauma, my first instinct is to build. To research. To look for solutions.
That's the Mythmaker.
So pay attention to what you reach for under stress or high anxiety, and align that way.
And when you're brainstorming, deliberately limit or add detail the way your House needs — because that won't be your first instinct. Your first instinct isn't always correct. Sometimes it's wildly influenced by things other authors told you, which worked for them and don't work for you.
Close
That was a lot of fun. I could geek out about this all day, but I have other things to do and a book I need to finish writing.
If you'd like more, watch the free workshop replay that walks you through all four rhythms. The link is at realindieauthor.com. And if you'd like a free Unstuck Author Call, go to realindieauthor.com and click Unstuck Author Call.
Thank you so much. Have fun brainstorming, and write amazingly.
