Outlining Your Novel_Map Your Way to Success

by K. M. Weiland

  • How can you use the subtext (the unstated) to exemplify the theme, so you won’t have to spell it out for the reader? When it comes to theme, the unstated is almost always more powerful than the direct. In real life, when we find ourselves learning lessons and changing views, we can’t always immediately define the changes in precise language. And neither should your character. Lord Jim didn’t have to tell us his actions on the island were a direct result of his earlier cowardice; the connection was obvious from the subtext and would, in fact, have weakened if Conrad mentioned it outright.

  Once you’ve answered these questions, you should have some interesting ideas to include in your outline. My results for Dreamlander ended up looking like this:

  Weakness: Chris Redston is selfish and irresponsible: He spends his life in search of the next big adrenaline trip, not really caring whom he lets down or hurts along the way.

  Who is he hurting? His dad, Joe, random bystanders, Brooke, Lisa, Mike.

  What does this character want? Chris wants to make the dreams stop.

  What does this character need? To take responsibility for his actions and sacrifice himself for the good of others.

  What does he know at the beginning? That people shirk their responsibilities and hurt you, and that life is always just one step away from catastrophe, so you might as well live it to the hilt. Excitement kills the pain and proves you’re still alive. If you never act responsible, then no one will expect you to be responsible, or be hurt when you fail to be responsible. (His fear of injuring others is buried deep in his unstated psyche. He would never tell you that.)

  What is he wrong about in the beginning? He thinks the best way to avoid hurting people is to avoid responsibility. He thinks the only way to feel alive is to risk his life.

  What will he learn at the end? To take responsibility for his actions and act for others above himself.

  Hero’s central problem: The realization that taking responsibility isn’t just a flippant decision; sometimes it’s a soul-deep commitment.

  Thematic principle: Force an irresponsible young man to learn responsibility when his actions endanger two worlds.

  Theme: If you’re going to succeed as a human being, you have to take responsibility for your actions, even if it means losing what you love most.

  How to Strengthen Your Theme With Symbolism

  The use of symbolism in fiction is more difficult to learn than you might think, perhaps in large part because, when done well, symbols are almost invisible within the framework of the story. Those that aren’t invisible often feel heavy-handed or even clichéd, such as the inevitable use of the American flag as a symbol of inspiration in war movies. Like the flag, some symbols are almost universal, and we utilize them to evoke reader emotions without even realizing what we’re doing. For instance, springtime is often used to symbolize new growth, redemption, or resurrection.

  The most powerful and unique symbols are those that flow effortlessly from your story. We find a good example in the 2000 movie The Patriot, directed by Roland Emmerich. After his son is murdered by a British colonel, plantation owner Benjamin Martin, played by Mel Gibson, salvages the boy’s toy soldiers from his burning home, so he can melt the lead into musket balls. The toy soldiers appear throughout the movie, underlining the character’s mixed emotions of loss, grief, anger, vengeance, and eventually a desire to fight for the cause his sons believed in.

  This, by itself, is an effective use of symbolism. However, the film’s coup de grâce is the moment, right before the climactic battle scene, when the main character melts down the final soldier into a final musket ball, which he will use to shoot the antagonist. It’s a superb use of symbolism that is powerful without being obvious, subtle without being ambiguous, and flows naturally from the story’s plot.

  The power of thematic symbols lies in their ability to drive home a point via subtlety and repetition. This is exactly what Kurt Vonnegut does so well in his revered anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five. This strange novel is stripped down to stark essentials in a way that makes Vonnegut’s repetition of thematic motifs particularly striking. He repeats certain phrases and images throughout the book, with an almost poetic variation, using both the blatant repetition and the subtle reinforcement of theme to drive his motifs deep into the reader’s mind. In particular, he repeatedly uses the phrases “blue and ivory” to evoke cold, “mustard gas and roses” to describe foul smells, and, famously, “so it goes” to underline the tragedies referenced or described in the story.

  Although some may argue that Vonnegut repeats his phrases to the point he compromises his subtlety, his book is nonetheless a conspicuous example of how a few evocative and memorable phrasings, carefully repeated for emphasis, can take a thematic experience into deeper waters, forcing readers to look beyond the obvious to the message behind the motifs.

  Story without theme is like ice cream without milk. But to be effective, theme must be organic. Like all the finer points of writing, theme is an art worth mastering. If you can get a handle on your theme while in the early outlining stages, you’ll be able to strengthen the entire arc of your story, and, by the time you’re ready to write the first draft, the characters, plot, and theme will sing in perfect harmony.

  Chapter Five Checklist

  Identify your characters’ motives, desires, and goals.

  Decide how you can frustrate your character’s desires and goals to create conflict.

  Make a list of the antagonistic forces that will counter your protagonist.

  Identify the themes already present in your story, select the most prominent one, and decide how you can strengthen it throughout the story.

  Keep your eyes open for possible symbols you can use to reinforce your theme.

  Asking the Authors: John Robinson

  Bio: The author of the Joe Box mystery series (RiverOak) and the thriller Heading Home (Sheaf House), John Robinson spent three years teaching fiction tracks at Glorieta, a nationally ranked writers’ conference. Visit him at http://www.johnrobinsonbooks.com.

  Can you describe your outlining process?

  Usually, my outlines are quite short—a couple pages in a yellow legal pad. It’s more of a “primary plot point” type of document, giving me a story arc to follow. Secondary plot points, as well as ancillary characters, seem to show up on their own. Sometimes they bring peanuts.

  What is the greatest benefit of outlining?

  It helps me see the big picture and keeps me from getting bogged down in tar pits or rabbit trails that lead nowhere.

  What is the biggest pitfall of outlining?

  The biggest potential pitfall, I think, is to make an outline so rich and so detailed it sucks the life out of the story. I heard a very well-known writer speak at a conference several years ago, and he told the group his New York house required him to submit a forty-page outline for his next novel. Forty pages. Man, by that point you might as well go ahead and write the story!

  Do you recommend “pantsing” for certain situations and outlining for others?

  I tried pantsing. Once. The result was astoundingly bad. At the end of two hours of writing I had a bunch of stuff on a page, but no story could be found. Maybe it’s just the way my brain works, but for me, an outline is not only a road map, it’s a GPS. Without one, I’m soon driving down a one-way street at midnight in a bad part of a strange city. No thanks!

  What’s the most important contributing factor to a successful outlining experience?

  Just determining to sit down and hammer the silly thing out. Toiling over an outline ranks right down there with learning multiplication tables: drudgery, and then some. But once it’s finished, then you can hand the story over to your creative side and let fly.

  Chapter Six

  Character Sketches, Pt. 1:

  Exploring Backstory

  “Your character’s backstory should feel to you that it doesn’t ‘end’ where the story proper begins. It needs to still be there, under the surface.
And if it’s strong enough it will help immeasurably in creating a powerful [story].”

  —Pauline Kiernan18

  Now that your General Sketches have given you a good idea of your plot progression and story arc, and now that you’ve filled in the obvious plot holes, it’s time to work on Character Sketches—beginning with backstory. When Ernest Hemingway spoke about the dignity of an iceberg being “due to only one-eighth of it being above water,”19 he was speaking about the importance of the part of the story that isn’t told. Those seven-eighths underwater are the ballast for the tiny bit that juts up to glisten in the sun. More often than not, those seven-eighths are composed of one of the most important facets of any tale: back-story.

  Backstory, of course, is basically self-explanatory. It’s the story that goes in back of the real story. It’s the story before the story, the unseen history that informs all of your characters’ decisions and actions. As such, it’s understandably vital to the progression and consistency of your tale. Particularly during this modern trend of beginning stories in medias res (in the middle of things), a deep and full-bodied backstory is every whit as important as the story itself.

  By this point in the outlining process, you should have a basic idea of the major plot points. You know who your heroes are, you know what they’re after, and you know some of the things they must accomplish to reach their goals. But your concept of who they are and what, in their individual pasts, has shaped them into the people you need them to be, is probably foggy at best.

  Before you can tell others your story, you have to tell yourself its prequel. I begin writing my characters’ backstories with no other intention than figuring out where my story proper needs to go. The exhilarating part of all this is that the backstory usually takes on a life of its own and transforms my previously shallow concept of my stories into something much bigger. That little chunk of ice floating around in my imagination swells into a looming iceberg.

  Within backstory, we find the motivations in our characters’ lives:

  • The inability to measure up to his younger brother, which fuels Peter Wiggin’s anger and ambition (the Ender’s Shadow series by Orson Scott Card).

  • The long-harbored guilt for brutal war crimes, which impels Benjamin Martin to avoid joining the American Revolution (Roland Emmerich’s movie The Patriot).

  • The long years of loneliness, which influence John Barratt to accept the compulsory swapping of roles with his French lookalike (The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier).

  In some lucky instances, the backstory takes over completely, as in Milena McGraw’s After Dunkirk and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife.

  The key to crafting stories with many layers—stories with depth and ballast—is to never ignore the blank spaces in your characters. Don’t let them get away with telling you only what they must to make the story work. Search out the shadows in their pasts, discover their parents, their childhood friends, their catalysts. Don’t just accept that your main character is a cop; find out why he became a cop. Don’t just slap a scar on your heroine; discover where the scar came from.

  Using Your Inciting Event as a Launch Pad

  So where do you start your backstory? The obvious answer is “at the beginning”: Where was your character born? Who were his parents? What events in his childhood shaped his outlook? But, as we’ll discuss in the “Reverse Outlining” section in Chapter Nine, sometimes a less intuitive method proves more effective in bringing clarity and focus to discovering your character’s backstory. Instead of starting at the beginning, try starting at the moment when the backstory officially ends and the story itself begins: the inciting event.

  The inciting event is the moment your character’s world is forever changed. It knocks over the first domino in the line of dominoes that form your plot. It sets off an irrevocable chain reaction that will eventually lead your character to the maelstrom of your climax. This event shapes your character’s existence throughout your book. This is the event your backstory must logically lead up to. By beginning with the inciting event in your hunt for the buried treasure in your character’s past, you’ll have a better idea of the type of questions you should be asking. Questions such as:

  • What events in the character’s past caused the inciting event?

  • What shaped the character in such a way to make him respond to the inciting event as he does?

  • What unresolved issues from his past can further complicate the spiral of events that result from the inciting event?

  Maximize Your Inciting Event

  Before we begin answering these questions, let’s take a look at how to create an inciting event that will fuel your plot and drive your characters forward.

  What Is an Inciting Event?

  Bestselling legal suspense author James Scott Bell describes the inciting event as a doorway: “The key question to ask yourself is this: Can my lead walk away from the plot right now and go on as he has before? If the answer is yes, you haven’t gone through the first doorway yet.”20

  What Isn’t an Inciting Event?

  Your story may include several important plot developments before you get to the inciting event. For example, in Ridley Scott’s 2000 film Gladiator, the inciting event—the death of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius—doesn’t occur until after several important scenes, including Aurelius’s offering his throne to the protagonist. Even though the preceding scenes are important, they do not irrevocably change the character’s world.

  Where Should the Inciting Event Occur?

  Generally speaking, the inciting event should occur not quite a quarter of the way into your story. Setting it this late in the story allows you to appropriately pace the introduction of your character, his personal problems, and his normal world, so readers will sympathize with him and understand the stakes when the inciting event blasts into view. For example, Gladiator’s inciting event takes place after the character’s normal world has been established (via the opening battle and the main character’s interactions with the emperor and other important characters).

  What Constitutes a Powerful Inciting Event?

  Inciting events are as widely varied as their stories. Not all inciting events have to be earth-shattering tragedies, such as the death of a loved one. They can be as simple as the character moving to a new town (North & South by Elizabeth Gaskell), taking a new job (Twelve O’Clock High directed by Harry King), meeting someone (The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper), or even buying a pet (Marley & Me by John Grogan). What all inciting events have in common is that they accomplish the following:

  • Directly influence the story to follow. Robbing a bank may change the character’s life, but it’s not an inciting event unless the story that follows couldn’t have happened without the robbery. For example, in Gladiator, the emperor’s death puts his cruel and inept son, who hates the protagonist, on the throne. As a result, the protagonist suddenly becomes an enemy of the state, forced to run, and, eventually, to fight in the gladiatorial battles, which are reinstated by the new emperor.

  • Create conflict. Because change is difficult for and even resisted by most humans, it usually causes an atmosphere of conflict. The more change an inciting event creates, the deeper the conflict and the more intriguing the story. In Gladiator, the emperor’s death causes a chain of reactions that cements the animosity between the protagonist and the antagonist, creating conflict that creates more conflict—dominos falling in a perfect row until the conflict involves not just their personal feud, but the empire as a whole.

  • Grab the reader’s attention. Your entire premise turns around the inciting event, so go for something special. This is one of your most important opportunities to grab your reader’s attention. Don’t settle for something mundane. Patricide by a weeping son, such as we find in Gladiator, not only rivets viewers to the screen in horror, it also raises all sorts of interesting questions about the characters.

  • Should be followed by action. A char
acter’s decision to take action doesn’t become irrevocable until he acts upon it. The protagonist in Gladiator reacts to the emperor’s death by refusing to serve the murdering son—and then must take the consequences of his actions when the new emperor massacres his family.

  How to Write Backstory

  In exploring backstory, you’ll begin an in-depth exploration of your characters. The backstory of your novel is necessarily the composited backstory of all your characters. Your characters’ backstories represent the disparate paths that will lead them all to the intersection of your inciting event. You may use the methods listed in the chapter “Discovering Your Characters” to further refine your backstories, but, in the beginning, precision isn’t as important as freeing your creativity to explore all the possibilities. Haul out your notebook and pen (or whatever tools you’ve chosen because they offer the most creative freedom) and start scribbling.

  The General Statement

  Begin with a general statement about the character. In my backstory for Marcus Annan, the protagonist of Behold the Dawn, I wrote:

  Annan is the hero of our story. He is a hired assassin, a professional soldier, and in general a tough character. Tacit and solid, with the raw strength to more than match three full-grown men, he is a fearsome opponent on any level.

  He is currently in the employ of King Richard, as a member of his personal guard. He came to that position by way of Richard’s admiration of his fighting prowess at a fight in the lists during the trip East.