Category: Plotting & Outlines

Essential blueprinting for your fiction enterprise.

Two Down, Two To Go

The plot rainbow for Ghost Novels, Book 2 is done. On to Book 3!

This is the second pass on each of these rainbows. When we first generated them, we were looking at things from a pretty high altitude, and this time through we’re zooming in on things. Rainbow number two doubled in size this time around. By the time we were ready to number the cards and pick it up to make room for number three, it barely fit in the Auxiliary Writing Cave’s designated Rainbow Assembly Zone.

Now we have number three spread out in the same spot, and it looks so dinky! But we know there’s a ton of info we haven’t incorporated into it yet. The next step is to review all our notes about this book, then we can start adding cards to enrich this rainbow with details. In all likelihood, this one will also end up straining the capacity of the Assembly Zone.

A writing partner is someone who builds rainbows with you, and then helps you make them bigger and brighter.

Twist the Knife

Our characters hate us. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. It’s a hazard of this job we’ve chosen, and it’s one we usually accept without complaint. But this time some of our characters are ghosts, and, well… we don’t want to be haunted, you know? Nevertheless we persist — for you, dear reader. It’s all for you!

We know that, intelligent and discerning bibliophile that you are, you don’t want to read a novel about pleasant people who experience nothing but joy. Apart from being unrealistic, it wouldn’t be very interesting.

So when we’re hammering away at the plot rainbow, and we reach a decision point like, “Should Istvan Von Rupert crash his custom zeppelin, or get food poisoning from eating raw snails?” the answer is usually “Yes.”

The above example introduces physical peril for poor Istvan, but in our books he’s actually more likely to face emotional or psychological turmoil. So, “Will his wife leave him, or will he lose his job?” might be a better illustration. And again, the answer is probably “Both.” No matter how much we might like Istvan (which really isn’t very much, but that’s beside the point), we need to complicate his life for our own amusement, and yours. The scuzzier the decision feels, the better it generally is. And anyway, aren’t ghosts supposed to have tumultuous backstories?

A writing partner is someone who will help with the exorcism that will inevitably result from pissing off the ghosts as much as we’re planning to.

 

Picking Up The Rainbow

Last weekend was a little bit busy and a whole lot wonderful, because both of our offspring came to visit — because we’re all vaccinated! And they brought their significant others! And their pets! We had quite the houseful.

All of this meant that the Auxilliary Writing Cave was needed for other things, which necessitated putting away the rainbow. We’re able to keep making headway on the story even in its absence, but will soon need to lay it out again.

Because not all the columns are filled for every row, laying things back down accurately can be a challenge. Eventually we’ll number the cards, but if we do that too early we end up re-re-renumbering them and that gets messy. The solution we’ve come up with is to pad everything out with blanks before we gather it up. That exercise also puts a point on those columns that have a lot more blanks, which sometimes is just the way things go but can indicate that we need to pay more attention to certain cast members.

A writing partner is someone to help you keep your rainbows in order.

Does Everybody Plot Like This?

We’re curious about something, and hoping some readers will chime in with ideas. The basic question is, “Are we weird?” We already know we are, in numerous ways. But we would like to know if it applies specifically to how we plot our stories.

The way we do things, we always nail down the What first, and mostly the Who, then the Why and How are the last parts to come into focus. That is an oversimplification, of course. The details of a What will often shift once we know the Why that goes with it, or a What might get assigned to a different Who, and so on. But in broad strokes, first we figure out the events and then we go back to study them and refine them.

It makes us feel like investigators. We know what happened, and we have a fair idea who did it, so we’re trying to learn what makes them tick. Get under their skin and understand how they’d be capable of such behavior. Ultimately the key need for us is to know these characters utterly, to be able to see and smell and touch their world. Although it might seem backwards, we find that having the plot mapped out first lets us know the characters more deeply by the time we start composing actual prose.

So: does that seem like a weird way to handle things? Or, is it (shudder) “normal”?

A writing partner is exactly as weird as necessary.

Once More, From the Top

In broad strokes we know how the Ghost Series will end. Broad strokes don’t quite cut it, though, do they? Endings are important, the final ending most important of all.

There are, generally speaking, three different ways to structure a series. The first approach is to take a big story and cut it into bite-size pieces. The second is one in which each book is a self-contained story with a distinct beginning and ending, with little forward movement or continuity from installment to installment. Third is the approach we prefer to write, a sort of hybrid of the first two. There’s an overarching story told through the whole series, but each novel tells a distinct section of that story. It’s not that each book stands on its own, but that each tells a satisfying story on its own. But that means that, by the time a reader gets to the end, it needs to build to something truly spectacular. The ending needs to mean it.

As we talk through the four books we’re planning for our Ghost Series, we keep circling back to the finale, filling in more detail. The most recent time we talked about it, we hit a bit of a wall. The fresh insights weren’t flowing. So, heeding our own advice, we set the ending aside and circled back to the beginning again. And lo! Looking at those two points back-to-back was just what we needed to do. It shone a spotlight on some thematic things that were there all along, just below the surface. As soon as we dragged them out and dusted them off, it sparked all sorts of ideas. Concrete ideas about actual actions our characters will take! Not that they’ll be happy about it, of course.

We’re certainly not done with the ending. It will continue to grow and evolve as we work our way through the four books. By revisiting it from time to time throughout our process, we can refine it, and keeping it fresh in our minds gives us something to aim for as we plot.

Four novels worth of story is a ton to keep track of, but having a writing partner makes it a little easier. And a lot more fun.

Proof of Concept

Once again the plot rainbow proves its worth. Last weekend we pushed ourselves to finish filling in the rainbow for Book 1 of our in-progress Ghost Series. It deviates from the rainbows we’ve created for previous novels in that it’s wider and shorter, but it still covers the floor pretty effectively (and flummoxes the dogs). We’re not completely done with it yet, just done enough. The broad strokes are all there, and some of the nuance. We’ve considered most of the beats from multiple angles and filled in the big holes. Now we’ll move on and do the same thing for the other three planned books in the series, getting them all to the same level of ripeness.

At least that was the plan.

We were really pleased with how thorough we were. “Wow,” we thought. “That’s one nicely detailed plot outline!” And then we gave each other high-fives and drank some champagne, etc etc. And then we spent half-an-hour numbering all the cards and stacking the whole thing neatly so that the dogs could walk around the room again. It was all terribly satisfying.

And then, Boom. On literally the first day of work on Book 2 we discovered something lurking in the notes that needs to be introduced in Book 1.

Sigh.

Luckily it’s not something that will require us to rethink half of the plot, or anything dire like that. It’s a detail that needs to be included, and we need to give serious consideration to how certain characters will feel about it.

Discoveries like this are why we’re working the whole series at the same time. We’d really hate to have the first novel entirely written and then discover we’d left something out. It’s also why we are so enamored of our plot rainbow process. It’s much easier to shift a few pieces of colored paper around on the floor (while fending off a corgi) than it is to rewrite a chapter or two.

A good writing partner is someone who will sacrifice herself to keep the dogs happily snuggling on the sofa while you crawl around on the hardwood, narrowly avoiding paper cuts.

How to be a Bad Writing Partner

Sometimes, despite everyone’s best intentions, a writing partnership doesn’t work. Maybe you can’t agree on what genre you want to write in. Maybe you have vastly different ideas about how gritty your prose will be. Perhaps one of you wants to write in first person while the other wants to use third person omniscient. Or maybe one of you sneaks into the Auxiliary Writing Cave and chews up the timeline. Or the other other one of you walks back and forth across the plot rainbow while wagging your tail, scattering the carefully constructed grid into chaos. What we’re saying is, maybe dogs don’t make the best writing partners.

Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord are great at getting us out of the house for a daily walk-and-talk that would make Aaron Sorkin proud, but beyond that they’re pretty lousy writing partners. They insist upon pats and belly rubs, which keeps us from typing. The Bandit Lord enjoys lap time at our desks, but only if he can monopolize at least one hand, again interfering with typing. They both enjoy snuggling on the sofa while we brainstorm, but get offended if we need to move in order to reach a notebook or laptop.

We even need to use restraint when reading our work aloud. The Bandit Lord is a very sensitive young man, and if Kent puts any emotion into a scene where a character is mad or upset, he gets very concerned. Lady Marzipan once stretched very exuberantly and managed to poke the power button of our battery backup with her toenail, crashing both computers instantly.

On top of all that, they’re lousy editors.

Despite the nightmarish conditions here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, we’re actually ridiculously fond of our furry tyrants and wouldn’t trade them for any other writing partners. We’ll just have to start using the baby gate to keep our papers safe.

 

The Bandit Lord hard at work at his desk.
Lady Marzipan in a staring contest with her laptop.

Crop Rotation

Coming up with a story and all the people in it and a whole world where it can happen is a lot of work. There’s so much stuff that needs to be figured out. Working with a partner, that mostly entails talking about it. With enough talking, we can figure anything out. (Talking to yourself can work, too.)

Naturally, it’s not quite that simple. In any given conversation, we’ll pick a topic and make good headway, but getting a given thing totally solved doesn’t usually happen all in one go, or even in a linear manner. We reach a point where we’re not making progress anymore, and lay that idea aside. At some point we’ll revisit it and move it ahead. Eventually, after lots and lots of talking, we get everything we need.

It’s like crop rotation. You need to switch things up once in a while and let the soil rejunvenate. That might mean staying within the same story but shifting your attention to a different plot thread, or a different character’s arc, or it might mean working on a completely separate story. The point is, don’t strain harder and harder if your yield is dropping. Spending that energy on something else will be much more productive.

A good writing partner doesn’t let you end with an overwrought farming metaphor.

Smite! Smite! Ice Cream, Sunshine… Smite!

Within the world of the story, the author is God. You plant all the trees, paint the clouds in the sky, and breathe life into every inhabitant.

And then, you smite.

Your job is not to win the adoration of the creatures you create. It’s to make them hate you. If you let them fall in love, you must also tempt them to stray, or place vast distances between them. If you give them fortune, it cannot bring them joy. Okay, fine, they can get a taste of happiness now and then, but you can’t let them stay that way.

In the Writing Cave, as we discuss how to make some character’s fate more interesting, we know we’re on track when they give us the stink-eye and a sarcastic, “Gee, thanks.”

There is another side to this omnipotence gig, of course. If you grind everything down until it’s all just a gray paste, that’s just as boring as across-the-board sunshine and leisure. Monotonous suffering or monotonous bliss, either way is bad from the readers’ vantage. You have to let some characters off easy, relatively speaking, to give your hapless creations hope. Maybe they’ll be one of the lucky ones who doesn’t die in a fire! Maybe theirs is a love that can really last!

Well, maybe. Maybe not, though. Letting them hope is the key to making them really despise you.

A writing partner is someone to plot with against your own creations.

Nothing Is Ever Wasted

As we recently mentioned, our brainstorming for the ghost series has been very fruitful. The process of organizing all those notes into a single, coherent narrative was a sizable task, and not all of the notes found a home.

In the beginning, we were still trying to figure out what this ghost story was going to be about. We came up with lots of ideas. We’re good at generating ideas. Many of these ideas were even good! But, they tended to be a bit random. They were, in fact, parts of different stories.

These leftovers are a valuable byproduct. They’ll help us start the ball rolling the next time we develop a new series.