Category: Plotting & Outlines

Essential blueprinting for your fiction enterprise.

The Saga of Gigi and Pierre

It’s amazing that, no matter how conscientious you try to be about looking around all the corners during the outlining phase, stuff always finds places to lurk so it can ambush you during prose.

Naturally, we’ve known all along that Gigi and Pierre will become a couple, and that their bond will be tested. We talked about how things look from each of their perspectives, what’s different about Pierre’s attitude toward the relationship, etc. And we identified the moment when the first test will crop up. What we didn’t do was spec in a scene to show the fallout of that event. Then the prose draft had caught up to that point in the narrative, and this felt like an omission.

We had to discuss what to do about it. The default stance here in the Writing Cave is that we don’t like scenes that exist solely for depicting Relationship Drama. Words like “soapy” get tossed around sometimes. Scenes need to earn their keep, and we love it when they accomplish more than one job. So, we tried to talk ourselves into sticking with the blueprint, i.e., not adding a unitasker relationship scene and thus keeping the Gigi/Pierre breakup implicit.

Thing is, our original concern was that not making the couple fight explicit leaves a gap in the story. And that’s because the real rule about scenes earning their keep is that you include the ones that carry the story. Ask, “what’s this story about?” and, “what is this scene about?” When they line up, you have a winner. (NB, stay alert for too much of a good thing; if you showed it already, you probably don’t have to show it again.)

The story can be “about” multiple things. In our case, it’s about ghosts and it’s also about this Gigi/Pierre thing. Their romance and its ups and downs shape the choices they will be making later on. So, while we don’t want to give anybody soap poisoning, we need to give readers a decoder ring for why those two behave the way they do. So, this instance of Relationship Drama merits a scene, even if that’s the only job it does.

A good writing partner is someone you work well with, so that the soap operatics are confined to the page.

System Is Working As Intended

For the Ghost Series, we made a very deliberate choice to get all four books figured out before writing any prose for the first one. Our approach is to consider the project as one big story. Ideas that arise later on in the process might necessitate laying some groundwork in earlier books, and we aimed to give ourselves the most flexibility to do that without getting stuck in an infinite loop of rewrites.

Without an over-arching plan, without making lots of decisions up front, what would happen is we’d wrap up Book 1 and send it out for feedback, and then meanwhile we’d be working on Book 2 and discover a bunch of shiny new ideas that don’t match what we’ve written already. Meaning when our beta readers send us their comments, half of them have been obviated upon arrival. And once we started in on Book 3, the same situation would replay — only twice as bad, because now we’re trying to retroactively account for stuff in two prior books.

Ask us how we know. (Never mind; we’re about to tell you anyway.)

Our previous series grew organically. We’d write a book, and then discover that there was more story to tell using that world and those characters. So we’d write another book, and then another. So far, that progression has always led to trilogies. In one case, we did actually plan out books 2 & 3 in tandem rather than separately. We were starting to get the message even then. With the Ghost Series being a tetralogy, the benefits of advance planning are multiplied because so are the impacts of doing it inadequately.

So, we did a lot of planning. Lots of writing sessions that produced no writing per se.

At this point, we are working on Book 2. And so far? No major revisions have come up for Book 1. Several minor changes, and we’ll surely have more tinkering to deal with. But it’s likely to all be small-scale stuff like which tarot card gets drawn, rather than anything huge like swapping which characters are living and which are ghosts.

A writing partner is someone who helps with all the pre-writing as much as with generating pages of manuscript.

Mostly Not Failing to Plan

We did it! Or rather, Jen did it! The fourth and final book in the Ghost Series is fully synopsized (mostly). It has a beginning, a whole lotta middle, and an end that almost completely holds together if you don’t look at it too closely. We know the broad strokes, and that’s good enough for now.

You know how the weather forecast for tomorrow is a lot more reliable than the forecast for next Friday? It’s kind of like that. Some of the details toward the end are fuzzy, but it’s so far away it doesn’t really matter. By the time we get there we’ll have plenty of time to sharpen it up.

Vague as some of the details are, As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #4 is shaping up to be a beast. The synopsis is 27 pages long, nearly twice what #3 came in at. We’ve started to wonder if maybe we’re dealing with a pentalogy instead of a quadrilogy. It could be that it’s too much story for one book, or it could just be that we gave a lot of thought to the ending, so we know more about it. Time will tell.

All together the 4 synopses are 40,000 words. That’s 75 single-spaced pages. It’s tempting to slap it into one file and call it a novella.

A writing partner is someone who doesn’t let you take the easy way out.

The Perils of Disorganization

As part of Jen’s Outlining the Whole Damn Series project, she went back through the steno pad where we made our original notes and found some hidden gems that never made it into the typed record. We really need to learn to be more organized.

Nothing was uncovered that required us to make changes in Book 1, which is lucky because we’re alllllllmost done fucking with it. Books 2 and 3, on the other hand, will need some adjustments. It’s not “rethink the plot” level stuff, but there are nuances we’d like to include which impact the motivations for a couple of characters. Better to find out now than after we’ve written any more!

And while we’re on the topic of (dis)organization — if there’s something that has broad application for your whole story, maybe don’t hide the note about it in the depths of Book 4’s documentation. Just sayin’.

A writing partner is someone who is happy to share the blame when things are suboptimal.

Outline Outlier?

The prose outline for Book 3 is complete, moving us one step closer to world domination.

If Jen thought the notes for Book 2 were disorganized, she had no idea what was in store! At least for that one we had about half of a synopsis already written. For Book 3 there was no such handholding. Jen started with only a plot rainbow, a blinking cursor, and twenty-odd pages of jumbled notes. Combing through old emails uncovered a few more details and highlighted the one really smart thing we did for this project: set up an email address just for our brainstorming notes. They might be hella disorganized, but at least they’re all in one place without anything off-topic.

Out came the hammer and tongs, and over the course of about 2 weeks Jen whipped Book 3 into shape. The synopsis is a bit shorter than the one for Book 2, even though there’s a ton of story. This implies that there’s a lot of detail yet to be fleshed out. Most of it should appear naturally as we write Book 2, so the next time we pick this up we should be able to en-hugen it significantly.

Which will be good, because looking ahead to Book 4, we’re expecting a whopper. We (read: Jen) strongly STRONGLY prefer it when all the books in a series are approximately the same size. If Book 3 turns out to be the runt of the litter by a significant amount, there’s no telling what might happen.

A writing partner is someone who humors you about your silly hangups.

We’ll Stop Procrastinating Someday

As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1’s first draft is nearly in the can. Or maybe it’s technically the second draft — we’re filling in the holes and smoothing out the inconsistencies, making it presentable for test readers. Very soon we’ll have to set it aside and start working on Book 2 in the series.

Jen wrapped up the lengthy prose outline for Book 2, a process made more complicated than it should have been through procrastination. During our year-long planning of the whole series, we took a ton of notes. We just didn’t organize them very well. Why should we? We planned to jump right in and write the synopses for all four books while the whole thing was fresh in our minds, but then we didn’t. Neither of us can exactly remember why. The upshot is that Jen had to do a lot of digging, and we had to have a lot of conversations where we tried to jog each other’s memories about story details we couldn’t quite remember but didn’t want to lose.

To prevent that from happening again when it’s time for Book 3, we decided to be smart this time and get the whole rest of the series organized and summarized and synopsized before we start writing any of Book 2. Jen’s been working on that while Kent day-jobs, presenting him with a page or two to review after he clocks out. It’s been quite interesting to review these later events now that we’ve gotten to know some of the characters. We’ve written a whole book about them, really gotten inside their skin. Now that they’re fleshed out (or maybe not “fleshed” out, since it’s a ghost story), it makes their actions that much more real, their story arcs that much more fulfilling.

In some cases, though, it makes our planned story beats feel like missteps. Our characters are like real people now, and we’ve noticed a few things that feel, well, out of character. So far they’re fairly minor details, nothing that will break the story. We’ve talked through them and found solutions. But uncovering these hiccups uncovers another reason for us to follow through and get the whole series thoroughly written up — we need to have a firm grip on the whole thing so that we don’t unknowingly steer ourselves into an untenable position.

A writing partner is someone who’ll tame the jungle of your old notes to make a garden of well-laid plans.

Side-Hustling By the Seat of My Pants

In the great “debate” about pantsing it versus plotting things out, Rune Skelley is solidly in the plotters’ camp. That doesn’t mean we never do anything spontaneous, though. In fact, sometimes we (or, Kent at least) even write stuff without plotting it out first at all.

Only on side projects, of course. His current extracurricular fiction exercise is a short story called Pearl, which he’s very much making up from scratch. The premise and the main character popped into his head, and he just started writing. And he is very much enjoying getting to see where it’s going.

The problem is, it doesn’t know yet where it’s going. Not really. It’s going to meander a bit before it reaches the destination. Maybe that shouldn’t be called a problem. It’s just a different process. And for a short story, Kent is willing to roll with it. He might end up needing to write a novella’s worth to get that short story out of it, but journeys are said to be what life is all about. And if the seat of his pants gets a little threadbare by the time he’s done, he’ll just learn to appreciate the breeze.

With larger-scale projects, that attitude would threaten our ability to finish what we start. It’s work enough to tell the story well when you already know how it goes. Needing to invent it on the fly, keep it on track, and make the sentences sparkle is too many plates to keep spinning, especially when there are multiple POV characters and a detailed world that needs building. Add to that the need (in our case) to coordinate the efforts of two co-authors, and it’s clear that an assiduous planning regime is the only survivable option.

A writing partner is someone who always has your back, even if sometimes their own butt might not be covered.

We Have Big Plans… And They’ll Have to Get Bigger

If a little planning is good, then a lot of planning should be great, right? And you know what would be best of all? All. The. Planning.

Except, no. There is such a thing as too much planning. It’s not a catastrophe if it happens, but it can create some headaches. As we recently discovered. (Spoiler: we’d say the problems you get with overplanning are better ones to have than what you get with underplanning.)

As regular blog readers know, we outlined all four Ghost Books at once. We wanted to know where the plot is going, and be able to do nifty thematic stuff and foreshadowing. Great. In the process, we did end up creating a problem for ourselves, which we’ve discovered now that we’re closing in on the end of book one.

There’s a very fancy prop — think priceless magical heirloom — that gets used prominently in the first book and then is never mentioned at all in the outlines of the later volumes. We think we’ve figured out how it happened. During the outlining, we thought of this item as more of an aesthetic element, something that added spice to a few early scenes but wouldn’t really be missed later on. During the creation of the actual prose, it became nifty-keen in ways we hadn’t anticipated, becoming something that we couldn’t just stop mentioning. Anyway, we caught it and we can easily (we hope) tweak the future outlines to factor it in.

Given that what we’re saying is we missed some stuff, it might not be obvious how this  represents overplanning. But it was. We just planned out a few too many books all at once. We didn’t apply to the outlining process the lessons we’ve learned about stubs. There’s a reason we do our stubs in batches, which is so that we can course-correct as we go. So, now we’ll have to course-correct anyway. No big deal. Much easier to fix outlines than completed manuscripts!

The take-away is this: there’s an optimal amount of planning, and it’s probably better to do a little too much than not enough.

“Most of the Time, You’re Right” He Admitted

Outlines are good. Stubs are good. Something we probably don’t mention enough on here is that the invisible in-between step is also good. A lot of realizations happen while converting the outline into stubs. We realize that certain scenes aren’t really needed, and we realize that there are gaps we need to fill. During outlining it might have seemed crucial to include the fact that Muriel goes for a manicure, but that doesn’t mean we’re obligated to create a scene just so we can show that.

Now, because building stubs is Jen’s job, she’s the one who usually comes to such realizations. And because she’s an awesome writing partner, she runs her intended changes past Kent first. Which is great. But Kent does find himself trying to strike a delicate balance during those chats.

It’s always a safe bet that Jen’s idea is a good one and will improve the novel. Therefore, Kent nearly always ends up agreeing with what she’s suggesting. The trouble is, when someone seems to automatically agree with whatever you say it feels like they’re not really listening. Kent likes to demonstrate that he’s listening and show some investment in the outcome. He likes to have an opinion. But overdoing things in that direction causes problems as well. It’s not that there’s really such a fine line between pushover and pompous ass, but at times it can feel that way.

It’s always good to be able to articulate why you like something, not just, “It was good.” (This is good to keep in mind for critique as well.) “You’re right, we don’t need the trip to the salon — showing Muriel admiring her nails later conveys it with one line instead of a whole scene.”

A writing partner is someone who listens to their writing partner.

It Was… Soap Poisoning

Turning our outlines into manuscripts requires an intermediate step (which we’ve talked about a lot in the past) – stubs. Stubs can be seen as super rough first drafts or as scene synopses. They take the story’s skeleton and fatten it up a bit, to give an idea of how the dots will look when they’re all connected. (Who doesn’t love a mixed metaphor?) When Jen was working on the latest batch of stubs for As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, she made an uncomfortable discovery. We’d reached a part of the plot where a lot of interpersonal shenanigans happen, and if she wasn’t careful, things would take quite a turn into the soap-operatic.

All of the relationship stuff needs to happen so that folks will be in their correct positions later on to keep the plot rolling as planned. We just didn’t want anyone — readers or characters — to forget that this is a ghost story. Spooky stuff needs to happen from time to time to maintain the eerie tone.

It wasn’t obvious from the outline just how long this stretch of non-spectral stuff would be. It looked like only a bullet point or two, until Jen started to unpack it all. “Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord get married” doesn’t seem like it will necessarily need multiple scenes until you remember that they first have to book a venue and hire a DJ, and that those activities are very challenging for them because they are dogs.

By the time it was all sketched out, it came to something like 10 scenes where the ghosts just had no jobs, and that’s too many scenes in a row. Jen sat with the problem for several work sessions, moving the pieces around on the board and folding ingredients in from adjacent sections until the batter was smooth and had a pleasingly marbled appearance. (We use a standmixer to process our metaphors. Saves time.) The weird and eerie elements of the story wouldn’t get lost while the humans dealt with their assorted interpersonal crises.

A writing partner is someone who’s a strategizing chef in the Writing Cave and an osteopathic artist in, well, also the Writing Cave.