Outlining Your Novel_Map Your Way to Success
Page 5
Can you describe your outlining process?
I usually prefer writing a book without using an outline. But, currently, I have an editor who requires an outline before I start work on the first draft. So outlining is something I’ve learned to adapt to.
First, I come up with a quick summary of the book I plan on writing—almost like back cover copy. That gives me a focal point for the book. With my outlines, I hit all the plot highlights. I’ll introduce the main characters as they come “onstage,” introduce the suspects through their interactions with the intended victim, then continue on to the discovery of the first body, and the investigation following the discovery (questioning each suspect). Then there’s a second body discovered, and the investigation commences again before the sleuth solves the case and confronts the killer.
My goal for the outline is simply for my editor to see the bones of my book—and for her to hopefully say, “This sounds like a good story.”
Basically, I’m just treating the outline as if someone were asking me, “And then what happened?” I’m hitting the book’s main events and not going into a lot of detail—but enough to explain character motivation, show some character growth, and touch on any important subplots.
What is the greatest benefit of outlining?
I found that, although the outlining process is time-consuming, it made the actual writing of the book go more smoothly afterwards. Also, knowing the main plot was planned meant I could devote more time to subplots and descriptions during the first draft—those are usually elements I add during later drafts.
What is the biggest pitfall of outlining?
I think the biggest pitfall of outlining is the feeling we’re doing something a little clinical and less creative. I try to approach the outline as a brainstorming process—as “what iffing” on paper. Once I infused the process with some creativity, it went a lot smoother for me.
Do you recommend “pantsing” for certain situations and outlining for others?
I think if you’re getting stuck when you’re following your outline, give yourself permission to stray a little. Ask yourself if the story would change for the better if you took a different approach to the scene. Also, I think it’s easier to be really vague about a particularly emotional scene in an outline… referring to a frightening or upsetting scene in the more clinical format of an outline can make it difficult to really put yourself into the frame of mind needed to write the scene when you’re writing the first draft.
What’s the most important contributing factor to a successful outlining experience?
For me, it was the moment when I relaxed a little and realized I could edit the outline. I told myself the outline, like a first draft, was not going to be the perfect plan for the book until I tweaked it. I gave myself permission to take some wrong turns and to just treat the exercise as brainstorming on paper. By the time I turn in the final draft of the outline, it’s just the way I want it… but it takes some rewrites to get there.
Chapter Four
General Sketches, Pt. 1:
Connecting the Dots
“Enter the writing process with a childlike sense of wonder and discovery. Let it surprise you.”
—Charles Ghigna10
Now that you’ve crafted your premise into a secure sailing vessel, you can embark into the deeper waters of your story by writing what I call “General Sketches.” You’ll be logging the ideas you’ve already formed, harpooning for plot holes, and testing the cut of your story arc. General Sketches are outlining in its broadest manifestation. You won’t be plotting every detail of your novel just yet. Right now, you’re slitting the packing tape and opening the box that holds your story. You’ll be discovering the beautiful and disparate parts inside that box and learning how they fit together.
In many ways, this is the most important stage of the outline, since it’s where you give yourself permission to throw every idea—no matter how offbeat—onto the page. You’ll be writing down what you already know about the story, crafting it into a synopsis of sorts, and discovering the plot holes. Take the time to ask yourself lots of “what ifs” and “whys.” Why is the character behaving this way? Why is she bitter about her past? What if he makes a radically different decision at a crucial point in the plot?
The few scenes of which you’re already aware are the dots in your connect-the-dots puzzle. Now, it’s time for you to figure out how and why the lines follow this particular pattern. Thanks to the outlining process, that job is much more easily accomplished, since you can concentrate all your attention on answering the questions, rather than also struggling to construct full-blown scenes, complete with characters, dialogue, and a consistent plot.
The Scene List
After the initial spark of inspiration, most of my stories require several years of “brewing” before they tell me they’re ready to be put onto paper. Booker Prize-winner Margaret Atwood pointed out that “you know when you’re not ready; you may be wrong about being ready, but you’re rarely wrong about being not ready.”11 As soon as you get the green light from your muse, start by listing the scenes you already have in your head.
Summarize Your Scenes
In Behold the Dawn, I opened my General Sketches with the question, “So what do I know about this story?” and then spent the next dozen pages summarizing, in linear order, everything I knew would happen to my characters:
Marcus Annan, a disillusioned professional soldier, is wounded during the Third Crusade and captured by Saracens. He is nursed back to health by a Scotswoman who had accompanied her doomed husband to the War and was herself captured by the Muslims.
Annan, once recovered, is given the opportunity to escape. Feeling a debt of gratitude to the Lady Mairead, he offers to aid her escape. For some important reason, they marry, with the intention of separating once in France or England.
They escape and are met by Annan’s indentured servant Peregrine Marek. They keep their marriage a secret from him.
Annan has an enemy, for some reason. Can’t remember his name, so we’ll just call him Sir Enemy. They are at odds over something. (Etc.)
Some of the events you write down may actually end up happening before the beginning of your book, but, at this point in the outline, you shouldn’t worry about shaping the format of the story or choosing the best place to begin the first chapter. Right now, you’re just getting all your thoughts on paper.
List Your Scenes
In Dreamlander, I took a slightly different approach by writing down the main events in a list format:
Chris dreams of a woman who warns him to stay in his world and then shoots him.
Chris receives strange letters warning him to “stay away from the shrink.”
Chris learns he visits a parallel world when he sleeps.
Chris wakes up in Lael in the middle of a battle.
And so on. The important thing isn’t to create new scenes or try to fill in the blanks in the plot. All you need to do at this stage is dig through your imagination (or perhaps even your physical notes, if you’re given to scribbling ideas on napkins and scraps of paper) for every single idea you’ve ever come up with in relation to this story. Not all of them will work; some will be downright silly. But because all of them were conceived more or less organically and have had time to grow to maturity in the warmth of your imagination, every single one is worth writing down.
Highlight the Problem Areas
When you reach a part of the story that doesn’t make sense or needs to be fleshed out, write yourself a quick note and move on. My General Sketches are littered with comments such as “and then I’m not sure what happens” and “this part is all pretty sketchy in my mind.” These blank areas are the secret tunnels that will lead us to adventures unknown when we start digging into them. For example, in the first paragraph of my General Sketches from Behold the Dawn, I underlined every idea I knew would need to be fleshed out:
Marcus Annan, a disillusioned professional soldier, is wou
nded during the Third Crusade and captured by Saracens. He is nursed back to health by a Scotswoman who had accompanied her doomed husband to the War and was herself captured by the Muslims.
Annan, once recovered, is given the opportunity to escape. Feeling a debt of gratitude to the Lady Mairead, he offers to aid her escape. For some important reason, they marry, with the intention of separating once in France or England.
They escape and are met by Annan’s indentured servant Peregrine Marek. They keep their marriage a secret from him.
Annan has an enemy, for some reason. Can’t remember his name, so we’ll just call him Sir Enemy. They are at odds over something.
At the end of each day’s outlining session, I go back over the pages I’ve written and make a note in the top margin, indicating what kind of information is found on each page (e.g. “Sketches,” “Character Sketches: Marcus Annan,” “Outline,” etc.) so I can easily find what I’m looking for later on. Then, armed with highlighters, I run back over my notes for the day and mark in orange anything that needs further work. Later, when I actually begin my outline, I’ll mark in blue any idea that’s solid and complete enough to be transcribed. Whenever I come up with an idea that belongs either earlier or later in the outline, I’ll mark it in pink with an accompanying arrow, indicating where I’ll need to move it when I’m ready to start transcribing.
Because writing longhand precludes the use of Word’s Find feature and because riffling through a notebook full of sloppy handwriting can make locating a specific idea only slightly less daunting than deciphering Morse code, taking a few minutes at the end of each writing session to highlight pertinent portions saves a lot of time and frustration in the long run.
Connecting the Dots
Your basic scene plan may be pages long (as it was for me in Behold the Dawn) or just a few paragraphs (as it was in Dreamlander). Length isn’t important. All that matters is you now have a working map of your story so you can see at a glance what’s missing. In other words, you can see the dots outlining the picture that will become your story, and you can see the blank spots between those dots, representing the plot holes in your story.
At the end of Behold the Dawn’s scene list, my next step was to acknowledge the many questions still needing to be answered. From there, I dove right in with the most salient questions (Who was Annan’s enemy? And why?) and started experimenting with possible answers, some of which raised additional questions:
Maybe Annan’s enemy is a bishop or something. (I’ll have to be careful with that though. He has to be a completely fictional character. Can’t taint a historical character with my own views or plot needs.)
Could Annan have a secret in his past?
Maybe he’s a runaway monk.
Whoa, now there’s a thought. If I did that, it would mean Annan’s indifference toward life is only a pretense. He could have left the Church because of indifference, of course, but that’s too dispassionate for his character.
He could have left because he saw through the hypocrisy of the Church. But I don’t want to go too far against the mores of the day. Martin Luther hasn’t rocked the boat yet. We can’t have Annan making too many waves of his own.
No, better, I think that he left because he was hurt—maybe a friend was killed unjustly by the bishop.
Free Write
I encourage you to forget as many of the rules of good prose as possible. Write as quickly as you can and don’t stop to censor yourself. I talk to myself on paper, sometimes in first-person, sometimes in second-person, sometimes in plurality. Anyone brave enough to decipher my notes would probably decide I was dissociative! I tell myself jokes (and allow myself to laugh at them). I gush about my characters. I use exclamation points with abandon. The point is: Release your inhibitions and just write. Let yourself meander down side trails, explore dusty nooks and crannies, and dream wild dreams. Only a small portion of these ramblings will be of use in the final draft. But the only way to find the treasure is to get yourself all mucky crawling around in the jungle. No prim and proper tea here, ladies and gentlemen. It’s time to don your pith helmet and embark on a safari.
Listen to Your Body
As much as we want readers to intellectually appreciate our writing, we need them, even more, to react with utter, unthinking emotion to the underlying pull of the story and its characters. The magic ingredient in fiction is that special something that socks readers right in the gut and leaves them breathless with joy or sorrow (or maybe wabi-sabi, the Japanese term for that impossibly beautiful combination of the two). We have to be careful we don’t let the (very important) intellectual side of the craft take precedence over the even more important guidance of our primal, instinctive, emotional gut feelings. Our emotional and physical responses to our ideas are often the most accurate indication of their value.
We’ve all read books that were perfectly executed, but somehow lacked that magic. I thoroughly enjoyed the magnificent word craft of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, but, for whatever reason, it never connected with me emotionally. On the other hand, Jane Porter’s perhaps technically (and certainly historically) suspect The Scottish Chiefs never fails to wring me out like a washrag after dinner dishes. A story that connects with me emotionally will win my approval, even if it fails on certain structural levels. I’ll forgive your plot issues if you make me love your characters and resonate with your themes. When you can connect with the mysterious, often unpredictable realm of readers’ emotions, you’re likely to hook them into not only reading your story, but also carrying it with them for the rest of their lives.
How do you create emotionally resonant stories? It’s simple: Create stories with which you resonate. Learn to listen to your body and identify emotional connections and reactions. Whenever I hit on an idea that makes me literally gasp, that makes my lungs “collapse,” I know I’ve got something. Even if my body were to let me, that’s not a feeling I can afford to ignore. When a story or a character or a theme rips at my heart or fills me with joy, I know I’ve tapped a powerful emotion, and, if I can channel that emotion, then I’ll likely give readers a similar experience. Bestselling mystery author Elizabeth George spoke about how writing is as much a physical experience as an intellectual one. The “committee in your mind,”12 as she calls it, can lead you astray, but your gut reactions are rarely wrong. National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon explains it as:
…a little minnow-flash of unshakable emotion—a character, a situation, a voice…. You know you’ve got it when you feel a little tingle in your chest, a flip-flop of your stomach.13
In her children’s novel Emily of New Moon, L.M. Montgomery referred to the feeling as “the flash,” which kept the main character “a-thrill and expectant.”14
Whenever my chest collapses, when I can’t breathe, when my stomach seems to be practicing aerial dives, that’s when I know I’ve hit an idea that matters. Even if it should end up mattering to no one else, it matters to me. And, during the creative stages, that’s more than enough.
Will all readers react to your story in the same way you do? Probably not, because not everyone is emotionally stimulated by the same things. Ultimately, emotional reaction—that heart of all stories—is subjective. What resonates with me won’t necessarily resonate with you. But the starting place for any powerful story must be the author himself. If a story doesn’t resonate first and foremost with you, why believe it will ever be able to touch a reader?
What does your physical response to emotional resonance feel like? If you don’t already know, you need to find out.
Ask Questions
When you get stuck—and you will get stuck—remember to ask yourself questions. Instead of stating the problem—“the princess is trapped in the high tower”—phrase it as a question—“how can I get the princess out of the high tower?” It’s amazing how much creativity can be unleashed with a question mark. For a squiggly line with a dot at the end, it wields untold power. Periods put a full stop on inspira
tion. They indicate whatever idea the preceding sentence holds is complete unto itself and doesn’t require further exploration. A question mark, on the other hand, is a swinging door, urging us to step forward and peek through the opening. What’s in there? How can we find it? How can we use it?
In Dreamlander, I used explicit questions (and implicit questions via the word “maybe”) to explore a character I felt I wasn’t using to her full capacity:
How can I involve Allara a little bit more? Utilize her viewpoint more? She can’t just stand around talking to the Garowai all day—she has to have something to do.
What does a princess do exactly? Hmm.
What does a Searcher do?
Well, she rides her great black stallion around—talks to the Garowai—encourages her people—visits the Dream Lake—spurns courtiers, etc. I think I’m going to kind of have to play her by ear. Unless… she was reacting (vs. acting). Once she’s found Chris, her essential job is done, so the fact that she’s the Searcher really doesn’t have much bearing.
But could it?
What could the Searcher do—beyond find Chris?
Obviously, she’s got a good rapport with the Garowai.
Maybe the only person allowed to speak with the Garowai is the Searcher. So she’s kind of a go-between for Lael and the Garowai. But that still has her just standing around talking to him.