Outlining Your Novel_Map Your Way to Success

by K. M. Weiland

  How does an author manufacture this most precious of story ingredients?

  Happily enough, conflict is one of the easiest (and most fun) bits of story to craft. Once you have your character’s motive, desire, and goal in place, all you have to do to rain down conflict on his head is to start throwing up obstacles between him and his goals. We authors are really pretty mean folk. Here we are, creating characters whom we’re supposed to love almost as much as our family and friends, and yet, every day, on every page, we make these characters suffer by refusing to give them what they want and need. Truth be known, we kind of enjoy making them suffer.

  How can we grin at ourselves around our toothbrushes every morning and feel no shame for this blatant sadism? Very simply, because if we did, our characters would have no reason to exist, and we’d be out of a job. Conflict fuels fiction, and frustration fuels conflict. Every time the character (and the reader) begins to think victory and happiness are around the bend, the author has to find some way to circumvent them. (As authors, we often identify ourselves with our main characters, when, really, we are always taking the part of the antagonist: helping him in his battle to defeat the hero.) This sort of frustration is obviously necessary in thrillers and action stories, in which the characters’ lives must be under continual threat in order to maintain suspense. But even cozy romances and leisurely literary novels demand frustrated characters.

  How can you keep the stakes as high as possible for your readers?

  • Watch for lags. If you find your character happy or at peace, chances are good he’s not too frustrated. Unless you’re using a temporary lull in the storm to emphasize the disasters to come, avoid these quiet, happy scenes. Not only do they interrupt the dramatic flow, they also tend to be boring.

  • Write a list of the ten worst things that could happen to your character. Jot down all your ideas, no matter how far out. If you haven’t come up with anything feasible by the end of the list, write ten more. So long as the characters are always guessing, you can also keep the readers in the same state of suspense.

  • Vary the intensity. Don’t get so caught up in the need for frustration that you forget the importance of variety. Even the most thrilling race-‘em, chase-‘em, shoot-‘em-up scenes will grow boring and lose focus if they aren’t interspersed with low-key “sequel” scenes. Frustration doesn’t always have to be a code-red alert; sometimes it can be only a niggling murmur.

  • Evaluate your scenes for frustration. Take a glance at your outline and make note of what is frustrating the character in each scene. If you can’t find a frustration—or if the source of frustration seems weak—grab your list of the ten worst things that could happen and start bolstering.

  Whatever your chosen genre, frustration is the key to keeping characters and readers—and yourself—on their toes. If we’re going to give readers what they want, we have to deny our characters what they want. As humans, we all know a little something about anarchy and chaos, and it really isn’t much of a stretch to borrow some from real life and spread it around on the page—but just in case you’re feeling stumped, here are a few suggestions.

  Personality Clashes

  This is the easiest (and, often, the best) way to throw a little conflict into the mix. Because character interaction is at the heart of any story, character clashes will produce your most consistent and interesting conflicts. The key thing to remember about clashing characters is they must clash for a realistic reason. Characters who get along perfectly for the first third of the story can’t suddenly, for no apparent reason, explode into a manic fistfight. Instead, craft characters who naturally push each others’ buttons. The most obvious form of relational conflict is that presented by the antagonist—the supremely evil being whose sole purpose in life is to wreak havoc in the universe and cause problems for your main character. But don’t overlook the opportunities for conflict that exist on a much smaller scale in all of your minor characters—what fantasy author Janice Hardy calls “minitagonists.”17 Make sure your hero is surrounded by foils. If you find yourself with a minor character who affirms your protagonist at every turn, spice him up by throwing a little unexpected rebellion into the mix.

  In her time-travel book The House on the Strand, Daphne du Maurier does a marvelous job of keeping the conflict rolling without ever resorting to a major bad guy. Most of the tension in the book is the result of, not a super-villain out to do unspeakable things to the hero, but instead the protagonist’s wife. The hero’s desire to keep his time travelling, via an experimental drug, a secret, and his wife’s desire for him to leave England, take a high-paying job in America, drop his long-time friendship with the eccentric professor who invented the drug, and generally behave as a responsible husband and father put them at odds throughout much of the story.

  An antagonist doesn’t have to be someone who wants to kill the protagonist. An antagonist can be anyone who stands in the way of the hero accomplishing his goal, whether his goal is to save the world or just order a double latte. The more roadblocks you put between the hero and his goal, the more conflict—and the more tension—you’re going to pour into your story.

  Unexpected Situations

  Many stories base their entire premise on the unexpected (think of the Pevensie siblings tumbling through the wardrobe into Narnia in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or young upper-class Jim Graham being sent to a Japanese prisoner camp in J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun). But, even if you don’t go quite that far, you can still take advantage of the unexpected by forcing your character into situations and relationships that go against his inclinations or values. If you have a heroine who is terrified of speaking in public, why not put her in a situation where she has no choice? She’ll either cave under the pressure or rise to the challenge. Either way, the reader will be hooked.

  High Stakes

  Readers aren’t interested in stories about characters who sail through life, never encountering hardship, danger, or sadness. Rip your characters apart, put them under excruciating pressure, and then when things look like they couldn’t possibly get any worse—make sure they do.

  One of the easiest ways to raise the stakes is to create a tight timeline for your story. Even if your hero has a strong goal, readers are likely to lose interest if your character has all the time in the world to achieve that goal. Giving your characters a deadline—and suitably disagreeable consequences if they fail to meet it—ups the ante and keeps readers glued to your story. The classic World War II movie The Guns of Navarone, directed by J. Lee Thompson, presents a masterful use of the ticking clock. The heroes are on a suicide mission to destroy two huge guns in a German fortress. From the very beginning, they’re on a tight schedule. If they don’t blow up the guns in just a few days, hundreds of men stranded on the island of Kyros and everyone in the ships sent to rescue them will be killed. You’d think that would be tension enough, but scriptwriter Carl Foreman took things one step farther. Halfway into their mission, with a wounded man on their hands and half their supplies destroyed, the team members get word the deadline has been moved up a full day. Their already suicidal mission now looks completely impossible. Viewers are on the edge of their seats—and right in the palm of the filmmaker’s hand.

  Putting a time limit on your character’s goals—whether that goal is to destroy an enemy base or just buy groceries—brings a whole new level of tension to your story. If your story takes place over a course of weeks, try shortening the timeline to days—and watch that ticking clock energize both your characters and your readers.

  Inner and Outer Battles

  Both inner and outer battles are necessary to produce well-rounded, memorable characters. When these battles are present in every scene, authors are able to use them to simultaneously advance the plot and develop their characters within the plot. In other words, conflict has to occur not just on the larger scale of the novel (whether that be a family crisis or World War III), but also on the smaller theater of the
character’s inner life. Every scene must include the outer battle (the physical reaction to conflict) and the inner battle (the psychological and emotional reaction to events). Any scene that lacks one or the other is teetering on the Cliff of Not Enough Conflict.

  Combining the external conflict with the hero’s internal conflict offers several benefits, including variation of the conflict within your story, heightened stakes, and, often, a more enduring resolution. The most powerful stories are usually those that bring the external and internal conflicts to a climax at the same time. The 2003 film adaptation of Peter Pan did a marvelous job of this. The physical conflict comes to an exciting, swashbuckling apex when Pan arrives to save Wendy and the Lost Boys and duel it out with Captain Hook for good and all. In itself, the external conflict offers the viewer all kinds of enjoyable tension and its subsequent payoff. But if the movie stopped at that—if it failed to bring Pan’s internal conflict into play as well—it would ultimately have fallen flat.

  Because the film used the frame of physical conflict to force Pan to face his inner demons, walk with them to the brink of destruction, and then rise up to conquer both them and, as a result, Captain Hook and the pirates as well, it was able to use both elements of conflict to strengthen each other and to present the viewer with a solid and resonant finale. The external conflict was able to give the internal conflict an exciting and dangerous setting, while the internal conflict was able to give the external conflict a deeper meaning. Working hand in hand, they present an unstoppable force of storytelling.

  Balance

  Although it’s vital every scene contain some level of conflict, it’s also important to monitor the general flow of that conflict. You have to open your story with enough conflict to grab the reader’s attention, then continue building on it to keep him reading. But you don’t want to pour on the danger and the distress so thick in the beginning that you run dry by the end of your story. Using fore-shadowing and tension, build your conflict at a steady rate of increase until you reach the high point of the climax.

  Stories are about balance. A tale without conflict is going to be about as boring as watching condensation dissipate. But a tale that never pauses to let its characters (or its readers) catch their breath is boring in its own way. We have to find ways to adjust the level of the conflict. We have to give our characters a chance to slow down and get their thoughts gathered for the next attack. Stories must consist of both large- and small-scale battles. Mix things up. Throw in a variety of conflicts in all colors, shapes, and sizes, and keep both your characters and your readers guessing.

  Forget what the peace pundits (not to mention your mother) say, and heap on the conflict. Peace and quiet never get an author anywhere.

  Theme

  Theme is a slippery concept. The prevailing thought among writers is that if you apply any deliberate force to your theme, you’ll end up with a heavy-handed Aesop’s fable. On the other hand, a story without a theme will be shallow escapism at best and an unrealistic flop at worst. Theme is very possibly the single most important facet of a memorable story. Vivid characters, witty dialogue, and killer plot twists can carry a story by themselves, but, without theme, they will never deliver the story’s full potential.

  Common wisdom insists fiction is meant to entertain, not preach. The novel isn’t a soapbox for our religious, political, social, or philosophical views, and if we try to use it as such, we’re likely to sacrifice our stories and alienate our readers. And yet, ironically enough, many of the world’s most beloved pieces of literature are stories with blatant moral messages. We enjoy stories that challenge us and inspire us. We read to be entertained, but many of us also read to learn, to grow, and to stretch our horizons. This kind of depth is found only in stories that are profoundly honest, and stories can never be honest if their authors aren’t willing to lay themselves open on the page and pour out their deepest convictions and most passionate beliefs about the human experience.

  As an author, your most powerful gift is your unique and integral view of the world. When you strip fiction down to its essentials, the author’s viewpoint is all there is. He may mask it artfully in the colorful garb of diverse characters and impartial dialogue, but if he’s not willing to share with his readers his own passionate worldview, he’s not giving them anything more than fluff.

  So does this mean we should drag out soapboxes and start haranguing our readers into converting to our own viewpoints? Absolutely not. Nothing turns fiction readers off faster than a condescending author who preaches at them. Incorporating a message into our stories does not mean spelling out beliefs and arguments. Instead, it’s a matter of choosing strong themes in which we fervently believe, creating multi-dimensional characters who struggle with the gray areas of life along with the rest of us, and crafting a plot that forces us to ask the hard questions. Someone once said being a novelist isn’t about offering answers; it’s about asking questions.

  People are sometimes afraid of sharing too much of themselves in their writing. But let’s be blunt: If you’re worried about this, why write in the first place? What is fiction if not an intimate glimpse into someone else’s heart and soul? Whether your stories are read by two people or two million, your writing is your legacy to the world. Make it worth sharing. Write yourself a list of the subjects, issues, and beliefs you’d fight and die for. If none of the items on your list make their way into your fiction, you should be asking yourself why not?

  Use Characters to Share Theme

  If you concentrate too much on theme, you risk alienating your audience through moralizing. But if you squelch all thoughts of theme, you’re likely to rob your story of its central life force, its heartbeat, its meaning. So what’s a writer to do?

  As with almost every aspect of story, character is, once again, the key to making your theme come to unforgettable life. Theme is the lesson your characters will have learned (or failed to learn) by the end of the story. The best of themes well up effortlessly and even unconsciously from the heart of the characters’ actions and reactions.

  In Joseph Conrad’s classic Lord Jim, the saga of a young sailor who is haunted by his one cowardly act, the theme could perhaps be summed up as “the repercussions of betrayal.” Because the theme is a natural outflow of Jim’s initial action (saving his own life instead of aiding his ship’s drowning passengers) and his subsequent reactions (fleeing in shame, hiding out on an Indonesian island, and, ultimately, learning from his initial mistake and refusing to save his own life when the island comes under attack), Conrad’s views on the subject can never be construed as moralizing or off-point. Indeed, the theme is at the very heart of the novel. Without it, Lord Jim would have been a rambling tale about the journeys of an ambiguous and forgettable young man.

  The key to strong theme is strong character progression. The changes your character undergoes in the chapters between the inciting incident and the climax will define your theme. But these changes must flow naturally from the characters. If Conrad hadn’t presented Jim as an idealistic young man who desperately regretted his actions aboard the Patna, the ending in which Jim chooses to sacrifice himself on the island would never have rung true. His transformation would have come across as forced and unrealistic, Conrad would have been guilty of moralizing—that blackest of authorial sins—and Lord Jim would never have reached its classic status.

  How to Discover Your Theme

  How do you go about implementing theme? Or perhaps the better question is: Should you go about implementing theme? Many writers avoid deliberate thoughts of theme while constructing their outlines and writing their first drafts. Many enter their stories with little or no intention for a specific theme, until, somewhere in the middle of the novel, the characters do or say something that dangles the scarlet thread of theme in front of the delighted author’s nose.

  Although I have never gone so far as to ignore theme (from the moment of a story’s conception, I have my eyes stretched wide to catch that first glimpse of a
possible theme), I do believe the single most important trick for capturing the sometimes elusive and always ephemeral theme is to pour yourself into creating authentic characters who react to their various crucibles in authentic ways.

  Thanks to your outline, you know where the story will end before you ever write your first draft. Because you’ll be able to see your plot progression and character arcs at a glance, you’ll be able to identify your theme early on. Most stories offer a variety of themes, but you’ll want to ask yourself the following questions in order to discover and strengthen the most prominent thematic thread:

  • What’s the main character’s internal conflict? In most novels, this is a question that gets answered early in the outlining process, since it will drive the entirety of the story.

  • Which of the main character’s views will change as a result of the story’s events? How and why? This is where you’ll find the underlying force of your theme. Your character’s views will define his actions, and his actions will define the story.

  • How will the main character demonstrate his respective views and attitudes at the beginning and the end of the story? This is an extension of the previous question, but it is vital because, as we discussed earlier in regard to character arc, its answer will prove the changes to the reader.

  • Is there any particular symbolism that can reinforce the theme and the character’s attitude toward it? Like theme itself, symbolism is often overstated and generally better when culled organically from your unconscious mind. For example, sometimes you’ll find yourself using a particular color or image to represent something. If the symbol proves effective, you can later go back and strengthen it. (Refer to the section “How to Strengthen Your Theme With Symbolism” on the following page.)