Category: Plotting & Outlines

Essential blueprinting for your fiction enterprise.

It Happens When You Aren’t Looking

r-avatar[Location: auxiliary writing cave, interior. Kent and Jen enter with hot beverages, colorful paper squares, and steno pads. While Kent relearns (again) how to sit on a couch, Jen starts filling a steno page.]

Kent: What are you —

[Jen holds up exactly one finger for exactly one second, then resumes her mad scrivening.]

Kent: Should we start marking things on the cards?

Jen: Shhh.

[Five minutes pass, then Jen presents the still-glowing steno pad for inspection. Kent is moved almost to tears by the majesty he beholds there. On a single page, Jen has captured the essential form of Grandson of Science Novel, that which has resisted them for weeks. It’s like the surgeon’s photo, mysterious and evocative and somehow all the more true by dint of its artifice.]

Kent: What’s with the three lines that have stars?

Jen: Those are the places that aren’t really there. Deep, huh?

[Hold for applause.]

Ever since we decided that it made sense to do the outlining now for both sequels to the Science Novel, we’ve been hammering away at the third tale in the set. We confirmed that there would be plenty of story left to tell after the middle volume, but it was just sort of all in a pile. And we knew stuff was missing from the pile, but we couldn’t tell how much; how big were the gaps, and where were they?

The other night, some kind of threshold was reached in Jen’s creative faculties. As we’ve described previously, after you tell yourself things enough times they feel true, and when they feel true they become sturdy enough to lash together into a coherent structure. (Or, maybe the pieces are fastened by means of a goose wrench.) In this case, it was a structure that had three “and then a miracle occurs” linkages. However, that very night we filled in two of those gaps. The third one remains, but discussions about how to fill it have been fertile and are revealing new levels we can explore over the course of the book as a whole.

Having a variety of ways to look at your ideas is important to help you get unstuck. Having a partner doubles (at least) your chances of someone being lit from within by the creative spark you need to get past a particular obstacle.

Did We Say “Geniuses”?

r-avatarWork progresses slowly on the outline for Grandson of Science Novel. It’s probably no more sluggish than the corresponding stage of things for the book that precedes it, but the headwind is kind of killing our morale.

Coming off the wrap-up of Son of Science Novel’s outline, we had a lot of momentum. Also, we were brimming with ideas for the third book because there was stuff — lots of stuff! — that was left deliciously untidy at the end of the second one. Thus we were counting on maintaining our momentum and having half the work already done.

Er, yeah. No.

The ideas are great, but what we’re discovering is they’re not the hard part. The stuff in between them, the connective tissue, that’s the challenge. We got ourselves persuaded that it wouldn’t feel like starting all over, but it does. Dammit.

The advantages of having both books in a state of high plasticity are still valid. We’re still confident that working on them in tandem is the smart move. What we’re learning is that “time savings” probably isn’t among those advantages.

If You Say It Enough Times

r-avatarDuring the early phase of creating a new novel, which consists almost entirely of talking and note-taking with occasional forays into rainbow architecture, we have to figure out what is and what isn’t part of the story. Basically we have to figure out from scratch what’s true.

That’s a tough process sometimes. There’s a lot of hedging our bets and playing with counterfactuals, and it can become really swampy. If you haven’t ruled out at least some of the theoretical possibilities, then you have to be able to hold all of them in your head. (Good luck with that if your story is complex.) Because that fills your head with overlapping contradictions, none of it will feel true.

So that’s the basic lesson: you have to stop hedging and fix certain events in place, at some point. (Or, you have to pretend they’re fixed. By the time you’re revising a finished draft, it’s unlikely that all these truths will still be true. But most of them will be.)

Kent made the observation the other night that at some point the hypothetical story beats we were discussing had started to feel — a little — like things that had really happened. Where previously had been multiple, mutually incompatible possibilities, there was left a clear notion that “this is how it went down.” Getting to the stage where you can internalize the narrative makes it much easier to write about it. Now you know what happened, which leaves you free to focus on doing justice to the tale instead of being on the spot to invent it as you go.

Working with a partner at the story development stage provides a setting where the tale can be told and retold as many times as it takes, until it starts coming out the same way every time. It lets you leverage the instinctual storytelling impulses. Eventually, it gives you an outline so you can start actually writing.

Don’t think of your outline as a constraint on your creativity. It is an expression of that creativity. It’s your diagram of what’s true, which no one else could know.

Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun

r-avatarDouble your plotting?

Sure, why not!

The outline for Son of Science Novel came together pretty well about a week ago. We don’t know all the details yet, but we have a complete through-line, beginning to end. The ending that we envision allows for this book to stand on its own while also throwing to the next book, Grandson of Science Novel, which will finish out the trilogy.

In a fit of madness and/or brilliance we decided to go ahead and plot out Grandson (Novel #8) before hammering out all of the details for Son. (The plot hammer is another tool in our writing kit, used in conjunction with the goose wrench and the monkey wrench.)

Our previous trilogy was not written this way. We were still learning what worked for us, and developing our process. Now, though, we are geniuses, and we’re ready to tackle anything.

The advantage of getting into the final book before tightening everything up in the second is that we have the freedom to make adjustments all throughout the story. The downside is that too much freedom can be paralyzing. When you try to keep too many options open it’s impossible to hold the whole thing in your head. The plot threads ramify and peter out in dead ends instead of cascading smoothly through a flow chart to a satisfying conclusion.

In the week that we’ve been talking about Grandson, we’ve made a lot of progress. Almost all of the characters will carry over from the previous two books, so very little work is needed on their backstories. That leaves us free to really tighten the screws and make their lives miserable. Fitting fates have been devised for almost everyone, much to their chagrin.

Had we waited to outline this third book until the second was written (or even just thoroughly outlined) we would have felt constrained by what was on the page. Changes could be made, but would have meant a lot of wasted effort. So far we haven’t devised anything new that necessitates big changes in Son, but we have uncovered some thematic elements that will resonate more if we introduce them earlier, and we discovered the solution to a lingering question. In Son we had gotten as far as “there’s something wrong with this character’s process,” and by talking through Grandson we’ve decided what that “something” is.

Will we write the two stories back-to-back? Doubling up on everything else (right down to the number of writers we are!) has worked in our favor, so it seems quite likely.

Checking Your Wing Mirrors

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We all have strengths and weaknesses. Authors, wrangling entire fictional universes and speaking on behalf of the disparate denizens thereof, must be able to pretend to strengths (and sometimes, weaknesses) that they don’t really possess. We must speak with authority even when we don’t know what we’re talking about. And we must assemble a world that coheres, hiding its seams lest readers trip over them.

On the subject of blind spots, Charlie Jane Anders did a great think piece recently arguing that your personal blind spots hold a powerful key to better writing. Focus on identifying the gaps in your view, because that’s where treasures are hiding.

Writing as a team is a good system for minimizing blind spots. There being two of you doubles the chances of someone noticing an issue, but the benefit is even greater than a simple linear effect. Working together forces you to articulate ideas before they’ve become entrenched in prose. In the auxiliary writing cave, we speak often of “magical thinking,” and work to root it out. As new plot possibilities come up while we’re developing a story, we challenge them, prove them out. As the “official” plot grows, we talk it through in turns. That puts one of us on the spot to be able to string all the ideas together, meaning if the logic is flimsy in spots that’s where the stumbles will happen. Meanwhile, the other person listens and chimes in with corrections and questions where needed. It’s a very robust setup.

Talking things through is a great way to verify what you know and uncover unspoken assumptions, and it works even better when there’s someone to listen.

Untangling Things

r-avatarSon of Science Novel has been quite a challenge to outline. We know what events kick the plot into motion, and we know how things come to rest at the end. It’s that pesky middle part that’s been giving us trouble. It’s kind of like this:

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For us, plotting a novel is a lot like combing out long, tangled hair. There are many strands, and it takes patience to get them all in order. If we do our work properly, in the end everything will be silky smooth and free of snarls. It helps if you have a technique.

Our technique is the Plot Rainbow, which we’ve talked about before. Working to untangle Son of Science Novel, we’ve been approaching the story from multiple angles, running through it from various characters’ points of view. We make a little bit of progress with each pass, detailing more plot beats and gaining a deeper understanding of our characters and their motivations.

We know that Hortense will arrive at the cat food factory in time to save Godrick from being thrown into the giant pressure cooker so that the two of them can fall, improbably, in love. The trick is making her trip to the industrial zone feel internally motivated. The reader cannot wonder why such a prim, perhaps even prissy woman would darken the door of such a smelly establishment. Her arrival must feel inevitable based on what we already know about her.

Working backwards is often a good way to solve these problems. If you know that, for your plot to work, Hortense MUST visit the cat food factory, and the only reason you can come up with for her to do that is that she just inherited it, then you know that earlier in the story you need to make significant mention of her terminally ill eccentric aunt. (The one with 38 cats.)

Bringing together Hortense and Godrick does involve more than just keeping him from getting cooked. Their romance, however unlikely it seemed at first, must arise from within each of them and feel — after the fact — as natural and inevitable as the cat hair on all their clothes. This is where we really rely on our partnership, by role-playing the coquettish heiress and the plucky workplace safety inspector. The characters’ lives intertwine, braiding together into a unified story.

Having a process, and tools like the plot rainbow, makes it easier to work out the snags. Working through it with a partner also helps, allowing you to hand the comb to someone else who might have a better angle on the trouble spot.

When Real Life Intrudes…

r-avatar…which it did this week, it’s good to have a partner to rely on. We had to make a couple of road trips, and as always we tried to use that time productively. It worked pretty well.

We’re also playing with index cards to debug the new plot. These aren’t the color-coded, character-specific rainbow cards, but no-shit index cards. By now we have a fairly long list of events that we want to include in the book. So we made a card for each one that we could recall off the tops of our heads and started laying them out in different configurations. It’s a quick way to look at what-ifs, and it’s a great exercise to do together. It just doesn’t work too well in the car.

It’s been a little bit of a challenge to unknot the middle portion of this plot, and it’s taking longer than we’d like. But it’d be much worse to discover these knots by writing our way up to them in prose. And with a partner, at least there’s someone to talk to out on the road.

Tools of the Trade

r-avatarAs we get deeper into the plotting of Son of Science Novel, we’ve been experimenting with some new (to us) software: Aeon Timeline. It’s a very flexible tool for, well, making timelines.

Last week we talked about how we think we have all our new characters’ backstory figured out. In order to test ourselves and make sure there were no holes, inconsistencies, or open questions, we laid out the backstory in our favorite Rainbow formation. Each character gets a column in their own color, and each row represents a story point. It took two work sessions in the auxiliary writing cave to get the whole thing in shape, and to answer the questions we uncovered along the way. And to drink the mulled wine and the raspberry lambic.

When we were happy with the Backstory Rainbow, Jen set about entering all of the data into Aeon Timeline. The result is easy to browse, and doesn’t require immense amounts of floorspace.

Our writing software of choice is Scrivener, which Aeon is supposed to sync with. We say “supposed to” because we haven’t tried it yet. It will be interesting to see just what the two programs do when they talk to each other, and testing it now at the beginning of a project makes a lot more sense than pulling the trigger on a work in progress.

What writing tools do you prefer? Tell us in the comments.

Getting More Excited Every Night

r-avatarWe have turned a corner in plotting Son of Science Novel, and it feels so good. We no longer have to say, “Let’s try to focus on plot-level events instead of backstory,” because (as we knew would happen) our knowledge of the new characters’ histories is now sufficient that the story proper has started to come alive.

One key to reaching this turning point is that we’ve started to give our new characters some stressors and time constraints. The protagonist from Science Novel was, of course, our seed for the new story threads, but it took a while for other characters to really activate. Now they have pressing issues of their own, not just a static collection of wants that our returning protagonist will bump into. They’re not just waiting for their turn as a foil anymore, but are part of a story that would be happening even if this person from a previous book didn’t stroll through. (But of course, she does, and that makes things ever so much more interesting!)

Kent has noted of a couple of particulars, “That’ll be fun to write!” Those tend to be the ultra-geeky ideas. Jen is building up our repository of reference photos for the new cast members, a process that sometimes causes us to re-envision these people. It definitely helps us feel a connection to them.

The best part is, our momentum is building as our investment and excitement build. We still have a long way to go, but we’ve crested a steep hill and right now we’re picking up speed as we coast down the other side. The wind in our hair feels great!

Our Plot-to-Backstory Ratio is Now Favorable!

r-avatarNow that our note-taking has reached the point where we had to order refills for our favorite pen, Jen decided it was time to get everything from the steno pad typed up and organized. Which led to the happy surprise discovery that the preponderance of our notes have to do with the actual story, rather than the backstory.

During our conversations from which these notes are generated, we tend to spend a lot of time on the stuff that’s led up to the point where we will join the story, the “how did they get that way” of our various new cast members. While it’s vital for us to have a sense of history with these characters, we’re acutely aware that hardly any of the details will make it into the manuscript, and so we became concerned that these rabbit holes were distracting us from plotting the story.

Getting a rough plot laid out really didn’t take all that long. But as soon as we started drilling down on a story beat, we had to answer questions that hinged on backstory, and that meant coming up with said backstory. Then we’d climb back up and look at another story beat, which necessitated another round of backstory development. A few such sessions quickly resulted in continuity problems within the emerging backstory, and resolving those sent tremors up into the plot. It’s taken a few iterations, but the first half(?) of the plot is now stabilized pretty well.

The metaphors above might suggest pickaxes and helmets with lamps on them, but our tools of choice during this work are in fact two kinds of wrenches.