HALLIE EPHRON
“Story is what happened. Plot is the order in which it’s revealed to the reader.” I was the panel moderator at the 2019 New England Crime Bake when I heard Walter Mosley use those words. That simple statement stopped me in my tracks. I repeated them. Wrote them down. And I’ve been pondering them ever since. One of the biggest challenges in writing a mystery involves reconciling the sequence of events (“story”) with the order in which they’re revealed to the reader (“plot”). The story should be obvious and logically airtight, but only in retrospect. The pleasure in reading a mystery comes from seeing past the characters’ lies and obfuscations, past the author’s clever misdirection, and sussing out each character’s true motivations and actions.
Never Outline!
The argument for spontaneity.
LEE CHILD
The task is to write a novel. Preferably a good novel. Possibly a great novel. In your dreams, a novel so luminous it will be remembered with affection for a hundred years.
How do you even start on a thing like that? It’s a big, complicated question. Ask ten different writers, you’ll get seventeen different answers. And all seventeen matter, as do many dozens more. The handbook this essay appears in is packed with answers—hard-won practical advice, scalpel-sharp analysis, late-in-the-day epiphanies, and gnarled wisdom passed down from the greats, probably in a bar, maybe in the afterglow of an award ceremony. A diligent student could spend months sifting through the text, making notes, making connections, making lists, preparing.
But the diligent student shouldn’t do that.
I’m going to argue in favor of spontaneity. And against overthinking, and overplanning, and certainly against making lists. Specifically I’m going to suggest: no plan, no outline. That’s what I like to see. Although that four-word description is only the bumper-sticker version of something much more complex. But no less risky.
Think of the good novels you’ve read. What was it you liked about them? Probably many things. A strong and confident voice, no doubt, telling the tale with aplomb and authority. Through characters who for no obvious reason seem more real than made-up. Whose plight could be yours. Whose end could be yours. And so on. Many reasons, and many braids of reasons, all different, all combining and recombining in different weaves and proportions.
Very few of them concern plot.
Which is not to say great plots are not truly wonderful things. They are. We can all remember dozens of deliciously twisty stories. Especially the endings. The perfect ending is both surprising and inevitable, and we can all nominate a top five. Or ten. But be accurate. Were any of those stories not principally carried by the aforementioned voice and people and emotional arc?
It’s very rare to remember a book for plot alone. Again, great characters with great voices enmeshed in a great plot make a book memorable. Absolutely. But the characters and the voices come first. They’re the necessary prior condition. Without them, the plot won’t even happen. Because the reader will stop reading. Or carry on, at some level grudgingly, which will make the clever twists feel manipulative, and in the end irritating, not delightful.
Character, voice, plot. Which takes the most planning? Plot, obviously, except it’s a trick question. Plot is the only element of the three capable of being planned. Voice can’t be planned. Character shouldn’t be planned. Characters should just… be. But what does that really mean? It’s not as airy-fairy as it sounds. Characters are—must be, can only be— based on everyone the author has ever known, met, seen, talked to, listened to, or read about, and on every fear and joy and feeling the author has ever had. If they are so based, then characters will be organic, and they will ring true. For no obvious reason they will seem more real than made-up.
Voice and character are instinctive, mined from the deep subconscious database every author carries around. No planning. Only plot requires planning. Which can subtly distort voice and character, inevitably to their detriment. If an author is leading the protagonist—or the antagonist, or both—toward a planned reveal on page 300, they run the risk of making the preceding 299 pages less natural and less authentic. In the real world, no one knows what’s going to happen three weeks ahead. And if someone actually does—planning a surprise party, perhaps—it proves hard to act entirely natural as the day gets closer. The same is true of writing. Characters can start to—can be forced to—become less like people and more like pawns on a board. Voice can suffer, too. The aplomb and the authority can wobble. A tiny taint of apology can intrude, as if the author is saying, Yeah, I know, but I need to crowbar this idiosyncrasy in now, so he has a reason to do the thing he does on page 250, which leads him directly to the thing on page 300. Otherwise I can’t get him there. See?
Ditch the plan. Ditch the plot.
Just start writing. Something will happen, sooner or later. Which sounds scary, absolutely. To quote myself from the introduction to this handbook: The way I picture my process is this: The novel is a movie stuntman, about to get pushed off a sixty-story building. The prop guys have a square fire-department airbag ready on the sidewalk below. The point in the introduction was not to worry about subgenres, but the image works equally well here. Jumping off a sixty-story building sounds undeniably scary, even though the guy is well paid, he’s done it before, and there’s an airbag waiting. Writing without an outline sounds undeniably scary, even though those authors who do it are well paid, have done it before—and I suppose the airbag metaphor translates as inevitable eventual safety: the stakes are, after all, reassuringly low. No one goes to prison for writing a bad novel.
Except really, no one ever needs that ultimate consolation, because writing without an outline is actually not scary at all. Because actually, you never do it. You’re never without an outline. It’s built in. Where exactly? The clues have been scattered above: Think of the good novels you’ve read.… We can all remember dozens of deliciously twisty stories.… We can all nominate a top five. Or ten…
You’re a reader. You love this genre. You’ve read thousands of books. Therefore just as in: Characters are—must be, can only be—based on everyone the author has ever known, met, seen, talked to, listened to, or read about, and on every fear and joy and feeling the author has ever had, your internal sense of outline is already deeply baked in, based on every book you have ever read, every movie you have ever seen, every TV show, every play, and every reaction you’ve ever had.
It’s not a sixty-story free fall, tumbling helplessly through the air. Instead it’s an elegant dive, cossetted and guided and nudged left and right by the deep subconscious database every author carries around. Not scary at all. Something will happen, sooner or later. Easy enough. Because after all, how many plots are there? I remember reading Ovid’s Life of Theseus in grammar school, in Latin. On the bus home I was reading Ian Fleming’s Dr. No, in English. They’re the same story. Two great powers are in an uneasy truce; a young man of rank volunteers for a crucial mission; he enlists the help of a young woman from the other side; he uses a technological device to prepare his exit from an underground lair, where he fights a grotesque sidekick before completing the mission; he returns home to a welcome that is partly grateful and partly scandalized.
You know all the plots already. You could plan for a thousand years and not come up with a new one. What you should do instead is trust your voice, and let your characters do what they want. By all means have a vague idea—as in, Moby-Dick is about a whale, and War and Peace is about Russia. But don’t sweat the details. The reader part of your brain will tell you what needs to happen and when. Trust it. It will be busy combining and recombining all the best bits from a thousand books. Follow it. Let your characters retain their organic integrity. Let page 250 take care of itself. Take off the straitjacket. Take out the artifice. Feel the cool currents of air on your face, pushing you here, tempting you there, into sudden random connections, sudden new ideas, and wide new avenues the front part of your brain never saw at all. Try it at least o
nce. If it doesn’t work, no big deal. But if you’ve read enough books, and you’re as bold as a stuntman, it will.
SHELLY FROME
Perhaps the novelist E. L. Doctorow put it best when he said that writing fiction was like driving at night with only the headlight beams to guide you. You know where you’re headed but have no idea what turns you’ll make, who you’ll meet along the way, and what influence they’ll have on your journey. For my part, after I create an intriguing springboard and open-ended structure, I rely on a set of vital characters to surprise me and keep me going. Or, as Rilke, the Bohemian novelist and poet, wrote, “All art is the result of being in danger, of going as far as one can go and beyond.”
The Art of the Rewrite
Turning your raw first draft into a clear, compelling story.
LAURIE R. KING
There are—rumor has it—some writers whose first draft is their final one. If you are that person, congratulations, your brain was crafted on a different planet than mine was. For most of us, the rewrite stage is an essential part of making a tight and compelling narrative from a string of ideas and character sketches. For some, it’s where the fun lies.
How a writer approaches the rewrite depends a lot on what kind of writer they are. For example, outliners want a full map of the territory ahead before they set off, and happily spend large portions of their professional life working up to the actual writing, so they can visualize precisely what they’re going to find as they go. Other brave souls—the “pantsers” or organic writers—plunge into the dark armed only with a flashlight and faith. For them (… us), outlining is a largely incomprehensible process, and they learn what the book is by letting it grow.
Q: Which is the Right Way? A: The one that keeps you writing.
For an outliner, the rewrite may amount to a survey checking that the plan worked and all the details of plot, character development, setting, mood, timeline, speech patterns, research, and so on mesh smoothly. For the non-outliner, the rewrite may take longer than the first draft did.
Another consideration is, do you write long or short? Do you blithely produce a sprawling, 800-page first draft for a cozy mystery? You’ll need to get out your machete. Or is your first draft little more than 150 pages of well-developed outline? You, my friend, need to bring on the fertilizer.
Then there’s the question of publication. If you’re traditionally published, your house provides backup, other sets of eyes to check plot development, continuity problems, typos, and the rest. On the other hand, if you are DIY from the writing to the promotion, every bit of polish is up to you.
But no matter your situation—outliner or organic, verbose or pared-down, self- or full-service—you absolutely want to do as much as you can for your book before you turn it over to the world. Self-pub or Big Five, this is your baby, your reputation, your pride and joy. You want to give it the best possible start before you turn it out into the cold world.
Where to Begin?
Let’s say you’re an outliner, either by nature or by hard-won habit. You spent weeks shaping your characters, researching every setting, choosing the direction your protagonist’s choices will take them. Only when you knew exactly what you were dealing with did you open a doc on your computer and type in “Chapter 1.” That means when you reach the end, it’s all finished, right? After all, you followed your plan closely all the way through… isn’t that enough?
Well, no. Step one is to go do something else for a while so you can come back to your manuscript with a fresh mind. Then, read your manuscript straight through, looking at the story it actually tells instead of the one you assume is there. Does it follow the outline? Are some scenes and subplots more substantial than you’d intended, while others are thinner? If the story does follow your original plan, do you still agree with it, now that you see the results? As you read your first draft cold, trying to picture its world as if for the first time, you may notice that the story would be stronger if you shifted some emphasis from this character to that one, or that developing a formerly minor subplot would lead to some really interesting character insight.
Perhaps you didn’t plan but grew your book in pure organic soil. Fine—but now is the time to make an outline, as a valuable analytical tool. Pulling your first draft to pieces lets you see the stark bones of it: when your characters are present and how they interact; the overall arc and any hesitations, distractions, and thin areas in plot development; the story’s balance and internal rhythm. Does the tension build, fall away, build again, relax a little, then keep its momentum to the climax? Is there a heavy load of backstory anywhere? Is there a long stretch where the central mystery gets pushed aside?
Outlines, whether for initial planning or after-the-fact analysis, do not have to follow the classic tiered structure of I. A. 1. a. You can use a whiteboard with arrows, color-coded Post-its, three-by-five cards, a giant calendar page, Scrivener—whatever gives you a clear illustration of what is actually in your story, rather than what you think you put there. If you’ve been doing everything on-screen, sacrifice a tree branch here and print your draft out. Conversely, if you work on paper, going through your draft on a screen can show it in a new way.
The Stages
The rewrite process has stages, which again will change according to your writing style. If you’ve done nine-tenths of the work in the outline, much of your editorial focus will be on honing. Or if your manuscript is fluid, here is where everything becomes firm.
In any event, even if you feel certain that the structure is perfect, let your first read-through look at big structure, major adjustments, personality changes. Read without a pencil in reach, since what you’re looking for is overall impressions. Are the story’s bones good? Are its people real? Is its situation believable? Is its overall mood clear? Do you, the reader, care about it?
If the reply to any of these is “not really,” then where do you need to focus? Does the plot work but the people feel shallow? Work on making them lively, distinct, idiosyncratic, strong. Are the characters great but the plot circles and dithers and wastes their time and ours? You need to dig around under the hood and fix that: What are they after? What blocks can you throw in their way? How can you build the importance of the central concern? Or perhaps you’re left with the feeling that the story takes forever to get going, or it sags in the middle, or ends abruptly? Make some notes on where the flaws lie.
Now is the time for major surgery such as moving chapters around or deleting key characters. Here is where you slash and burn portions of that oversize first draft, or conversely, develop the major subplot that your brief manuscript needs. Keep cutting, moving, building until it is vaguely the size and shape you want—like a watercolor painter’s background wash or a sculptor’s rough cuts of a marble block. Only then, when you can see the correct outlines, do you pick up that editorial pencil and dive in.
Personally, I prefer to make all my notes, corrections, and queries on a physical printout. In part, that’s because I’m old-school, but it also forces me to consider any changes twice—once when I mark the page, then again when I return to put it into the manuscript. This guarantees that if I added something on page 34, then realized a better way to do it when I hit page 119, I’ve had the delay for reflection, gaining perspective as to which is better for the overall story.
How many drafts? That depends on what you consider a draft. Key portions of the story may need to be reworked a number of times, others merely polished. Ideally, you will need only three or four: the raw first draft (organic writers, consider this your outline); a second that follows any major surgery; the third, where you dive deeply into the balance and readability of the story; and a final draft that you read aloud for grammar, awkward wording, pacing details, missing bits of research, and the like.
(Inevitably, a traditionally published writer will later face the comments of their editor and copyeditor, but if you’ve done your rewrite thoroughly, much of their work will be done.)
So,
what are you looking for in this close, pencil-in-hand edit? If the major problems of structure and pacing have been trimmed away, what remains is to hone the story from plot to dialogue, smoothing away any rough patches, leaving a final draft that is clear, compelling, and direct.
The comments below are merely pointers, and are not intended to act as full editorial instructions. Most of the areas covered—genre rules, characters, plotting, rhythm, and so on—have their own essays in this volume. My task here is to guide your rewrite, and suggest where your focus should be.
What Do I Look For?
Genre awareness and consistency. Great books ignore the rules. Unfortunately, so do a lot of bad ones. Even a genius writer should be aware of expectations when it comes to length, complexity, focus, pace, and language. Is my story about a cat-owning bakery owner, or a middle-grade kid who investigates bike thefts, or a mad academic who plans to blow up the Vatican? No one kind of book is inherently “better”—but just as a middle-grade reader might blanch at a 150,000-word volume, an adult who has shelled out thirty dollars for a thriller might be irritated by a sidetrack into frosting. Decide what your book is, and keep every page true to its home territory in size, tone, language, and the rest.
Plot. Does the plot make sense? Do all the pieces of this complex machine turn smoothly, or are there some places where the first draft tries to cover over its uncertainty? Mystery readers are both smart and experienced, and if there are holes in your plot, if you have forced things into line so they end up where you want them, if your characters simply couldn’t have done what you have them do, then the story will unravel for the reader. Map out your timeline; go over your sequence of clues, reactions, and realizations. Watch for which character knows what, and when a fact is learned. Keep all the relationships clear, and all the actions believable. And beware of coincidences, anywhere in the entire book except maybe its inciting incident.
How to Write a Mystery Page 15