Category: Plotting & Outlines

Essential blueprinting for your fiction enterprise.

Outline Like The Pros

Kent has run out of stubs to work from for Untitled Ghost Novel Number One. Jen is closing in on the next batch, but until they’re available Kent had to find something else to do with his writing time. So he’s writing the prose outline for Untitled Ghost Novel Number Two.

A prose outline is like a very detailed synopsis. But while a synopsis skips over subplots and secondary characters, the prose outline is comprehensive. The goal is to capture everything from our brainstorming notes and the plot rainbow, putting it all in order with a rudimentary narrative flow.  Ours typically come in at around twenty pages.

We’ve never met anyone who likes to write synopses. They hurt. If it’s a one-pager that’s intended for use in marketing, it’ll usually be written after the manuscript is completed, and it’s painful to squash everything down so much. But the prose outline comes beforehand, and it’s painful because you have to describe a story that you haven’t really written yet. It’s sort of like a first draft. Of course, we say that about the rainbow sometimes too. And each stub is a first draft of a particular scene. Maybe a term like prototype, or proof-of-concept, would be more apt for these pre-writing artifacts.

A writing partner is someone who writes the prose outline, when he’s done procrastinating by writing about writing the prose outline.

Privileged Info

Some people like having an outline, and some people don’t. That’s fine. We’ve already shown our hand a million times here on this blog: we like outlines. We like having them, and stranger still we apparently enjoy making them. Doesn’t mean everybody has to.

Although working from a solid plan offers many advantages, there can be some hazards as well. Many writers who eschew outlining say it takes away the feeling of discovery. They’re usually talking about their own motivation and productivity, but there’s another potential pitfall. Sometimes the author’s foreknowledge of events leaks into the characters.

That can cause a doomed character to come across as fatalistic, or make the whole cast seem skittish around the one who will eventually betray them. The outcome becomes predictable because the characters are collectively telegraphing upcoming events. And if the people in the story just seem to be reciting their lines, it’s hard for readers to feel invested.

The key is to have a clear image of what the world is like for each character. To take on their attitude. Here in the Writing Cave we talk about it as “wearing the right head.” This might mean reviewing your notes about someone’s backstory, or it might mean physically acting out mannerisms. Focus on inhabiting the present, as informed by this person’s past. Sure, the outline prescribes a certain future, but don’t fixate on that. In fact, let yourself forget about it; it’s safely written down. What you want is characters who don’t know that they’re in a novel. The guy who bites the dust in the second act? He’s got plans. He bought tickets to a concert, plus he’ll be giving a big presentation at work. You know those things won’t happen until act three, which means they’ll never happen at all, but he makes his choices with those goals in mind. He’s not trying to fall off a roof.

And the outline needs to be flexible, so your cast can have a bit of autonomy. See where they go. It might be really interesting.

A writing partner is someone who shares in your joy at building characters up so they can fall that much farther.

Routine Sets You Free

People become writers for all kinds of reasons, but one thing no one ever says is that they just really love sitting and staring at a blank page. Writers want the freedom to create, to express, to put their ideas into other people’s heads. We don’t daydream about pecking on our keyboards; we daydream about readers saying our stories changed their lives.

Writing takes a lot of work. No matter what kind of process you use, whether it’s formal or informal or utter chaos, it’s a lot of work. Here in the Writing Cave, we do have an opinion about this matter. Our process is pretty formal. Not top-hat and cumerbund formal, but it wears a tie. Lots of people would say that the time and energy we spend on pre-writing might as well be spent on actual writing.

Maybe. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, so do what you find works for you. But a simple trade-off of one task for another isn’t the only perspective to consider.

The thing we like about having a good process is the predictability it brings to the sitting-at-the-keyboard part of the job. We don’t need to devote energy to figuring out if we’re working on the right thing at any given moment, so all our energy can go into figuring out innovative new ways to torment our characters. The creative freedom lies in being free from the burden of infinite pathways.

The expression “having your work cut out for you” is generally meant as facing a big task. Well, if you’re writing a novel then you definitely are. What that phrase really means, though, is that the leather to make the shoes is cut to shape already — you might have lots of shoes to make, but the materials are set up and waiting. That’s what a strong process gives you.

A writing partner is someone who’ll make sure you have your work cut out for you.

A Delicate Balancing Act

Something we’ve discovered about ghost stories from working on ours: they have ghosts in them. Who knew? And ghosts can be scary! But not too scary, at least not all the time…

As we get into a finer level of detail about everything, we discover that our ghosts must be around in the background of a lot of scenes that we didn’t really envision as “ghost scenes” and where we don’t want them to interfere. But we do want the ghosts to matter, to be an important element of the story world. A genuine menace at times. So, a lot of our recent conversations have dealt with resolving this apparent contradiction. And it’s turning out that we aren’t really trying to have it both ways, but just that our earlier, broader outlines of the story didn’t require us to dial things in like we must now that we’re getting gritty with it.

There’s a line we need to walk between too much chaos and not enough. That balancing act is what creates the feeling of suspense for the reader.

The question of how easy it is to reach our main story location is another whose answer seems to depend on when you ask us. The difficulty of the journey is occasionally a plot point, but it can’t be so arduous that no one would ever be able to get there. Again, conversations just need to get more granular so we can establish what it is about the terrain that raises challenges, so different characters can have different experiences without it looking like we’re changing the rules on them.

A writing partner is someone who’ll catch you if you fall off the tightrope.

Cartographer’s Blues

Sometimes there’s a lot of drawing involved in being a writer.

One of the artifacts we generated in our pre-writing for the Ghost Series is a map of the principle setting. It’s a rather complicated map, not only because the setting itself has many interesting quirks but also because the map shows how things change over the course of about a century.

But, Kent didn’t mind taking that on. It let him relive his dungeon-master glory days a bit, and simultaneously offered an excuse to use lots of layers in the Illustrator file.

We’ve included maps in some of our actual books. So far, this one is for our own use during the project, and we haven’t really decided about sharing it with our readers. All we know for now is that it’s going to be a living document that will be updated as we make new discoveries about our locale. In other words, the map that shows how things change over time will, itself, change over time.

Another trick we might use is building it in 3D with modeling clay. The terrain is quite unusual, and flat drawings might not suffice for making sure we both picture it the same way. This is something we haven’t done on past projects, but it fits our penchant for the tangible and the colorful.

A writing partner is someone who’ll help you chart the unknown.

As Predicted

Way back in January we made a writing plan for 2021. Let’s see how closely we followed it.

In true oxymoronic fashion, we wanted to start by finishing something. Editing the Science Novels was handily done, so — Check!

Next was plotting the Ghost Series, which gets another check.

And here’s where things fall apart a little. We were a smidge optimistic when we made our plan, and thought we’d have enough time left in the year to start the actual writing. Hilariously, we left open the possibility that we’d need to decide what to do after we finished the first Ghost Novel. Ha ha! Building four plot rainbows took longer than anticipated, and the actual composition hasn’t begun yet. But slow progress is still progress, and we’re very excited about what’s in store.

One other item on our To Do list that still needs to be addressed: deciding what will come after the Ghost Books. Extremely preliminary discussions on that topic have begun. A good writing partner is someone you enjoy having discussions with, no matter how preliminary they might be.

At the End of the Rainbow…

… awaits a pot of more work. Yay!

Now that our rainbowing is completed for all four ghost books, it’s time to start writing. Writing an outline, that is. Also some character sheets, and probably a map. (Sounds a little like we’re playing D&D, which is another form of collaborative storytelling. Hmm.) Actual prose needs to wait just a little longer.

To celebrate the milestone, we took Friday night off and watched a movie. Er, we usually give ourselves Friday nights off. And this movie was, technically, research. But we did get take-out, including dessert.

A writing partner is someone to snuggle up with on the couch to watch a movie that played long, long ago, at the theater where you both worked at the time.

Rainbow is Wide, Rainbow is Long

The plot rainbow is constructed from rows and columns. Which is which largely depends on whether we’ve laid it out on the floor or on our snazzy new whiteboard. But either way, a stripe of any given color represents an entity’s timeline, and a stripe that cuts across all the colors perpendicularly is a story beat.

The colors are out of order? You’re out of order!

Generally, we build up the rainbow by beats. “What’s everybody up to at this point in the story?” This approach feels natural for us during the early to middle phases, while the structure is incomplete. But once we have most of it set up, we find it very useful to run through each color the whole way from start to finish. Often cards will get added this way that had been missed during the beat-by-beat phases.

It’s important not to start thinking you have to fill in every space in the grid. Only create cards for the information that matters. It needn’t be anything that will become an actual scene, though. And by following each character’s journey all the way through the overall tale we make sure that their story arcs all make sense. In effect, we’re going through the whole cast in turn and asking what the novel would look like if they were the main character. Coming at it from these different angles really helps find the places where things might not join up smoothly, and it’s super easy to make adjustments to the rainbow. Much more so than in rewrites!

A writing partner is someone to criss-cross the rainbow with you.

It Tastes Like Victory

The plot rainbow for Ghost Book 4 is complete. And freakin’ massive. Our whiteboard is 4′ x 8′, and the rainbow covers the entire front and more than half the back. It’s really something.

So — the entire Ghost Series is plotted. It feels great! It’s also intimidating because these novels are what we’re going to work on for the next few years. No pressure.

Amazingly, we’re still really psyched by the story we’ve specced out, even after spending 3/4 of a year immersed in it. Before we can actually start the prose composition there are still a few steps we need to complete:

  • photograph, number, document, and file the Book 4 rainbow
  • watch a couple of movies for research
  • review the Book 1 rainbow, and expand as necessary
  • turn the rainbow into an outline
  • finalize character and setting sketches
  • write the first batch of stubs

Then we’ll be ready to really start. With all our pre-work, the writing itself should go pretty smoothly. It’s a good thing we didn’t just jinx ourselves!

A writing partner is someone who knows the proper counter-jinx techniques and rituals, and will perform them with you.

We Can Almost Taste It

We’ve been plotting the Ghost Series for some time now — much longer than we realized, as it turns out. A quick tour through our Friday posts shows that we first mentioned the plot rainbow in mid-February (!). That’s a full 8 months ago, and we’d already been hammering away at it before we told you about it.

Today we’re pleased to say we’re allllmost done. A few weeks ago we targeted November 1 for packing up Book 4’s rainbow and moving on to the next stage in the process. We’re pretty confident we could have reached that deadline with ease if family trips and Primus concerts and family trips to Primus concerts hadn’t intruded. So we’ll just blame our children (and Les Claypool) and wrap it up as soon as we can. You can’t rush these things. Like a pregnancy, it takes as long as it takes, and — also like a pregnancy — that seems to be about 9 months. We’ll have the Writing Cave to ourselves again this weekend. With a roaring fire and enough Halloween chocolate we might actually reach our goal.

A writing partner is someone who helps the time fly by.