Category: Plotting & Outlines

Essential blueprinting for your fiction enterprise.

The Skelley Fiction Roadmap

We mention stubs a lot, but it’s important to understand that we don’t just pull them out of thin air. The process has steps that go in a certain order, becoming more detailed as they progress.

Our first major step is a rainbow, which is how we collate the random notes from one or more steno pads we fill up during our brainstorming sessions. (So, those steno notes are prolly our real first step. But you know how to write in a notepad, we think.)

The rainbow is a color-coded representation of the major story beats. Each square of paper is approximately equal to a scene.

(Details about how we build and use the rainbow can be found here.)

The rainbow gets turned into an outline, which doesn’t follow the strict formatting you learned in school. If we were to write a hitman novel, it would look something like this:

And that gets turned into a stub. We fill in the template and write a scene synopsis like so:

The meat of the stub is the scene synopsis: a page or so of text that lists all the major events and how they make characters feel. (Our real stubs are generally longer than the above example.) The stub is not the scene; it’s the instructions for building it. The stub is allowed to tell instead of showing, in fact it’s encouraged. Don’t get fancy here.

When the actual scene gets written based on this, phrases like “Thomas is confused” would be replaced along the lines of, “He stared at Mary, whatever she was saying drowned out by a litany of objections to her very presence. She didn’t have a key, for one thing. He’d never told her his address, for another. And she fucking well knew she’d be waking him up.” (Snuck a little “… and cranky” in there too.)

We find the word count goes up by a factor of at least four, sometimes more like ten, when progressing from stub to scene. Any salient info that isn’t actually in the scene should still be noted in the stub. This is what we usually use the “Remember” line for in the template. If Mary hasn’t eaten in two days, mention that. Even if she’s not the POV character.

What to leave out of the stub: description, mainly. Mention only the specific details that are key to the scene’s meaning and mission.

A Stitch in Time

We have a sickness. As we write, we always try to estimate how many words long the finished manuscript will be. Why? Who knows. It doesn’t really matter, unless we’re coming up really short or going suuuuuper long. But still we obsess. We try to look at the outline and guess how many pages it represents, when we know in our bones that it’s a pointless endeavor. Some sections of the outline are incredibly detailed, others are done in broad strokes. It’s an inexact science.

Currently we are halfway through the outline for Sibling of Music Novel. 36 scenes have been written, and six more are stubbed and ready to go. Does that mean that we are halfway through the novel? Our guts say “not quite.” And since the manuscript is sitting at a hair over 71,000 words right now, that suggests that we’re looking at a finished product of something like 150,000 words. Which is quite a lot, in case you were wondering.

— insert all the typical caveats about editing and its impact on word count here —

Since we’re fairly confident that this one will be long enough, we’ve begun scrutinizing the outline for ways to consolidate scenes. Jen took it one step further and was reviewing the stubs still awaiting our tender ministrations. Turns out that there’s a stub for a scene that now feels unnecessary. By not writing it we’ll save ourselves the time that would have taken, plus time in editing when we would have agonized over removing it. The events in the ghost scene still happened to the characters, but we’re confident that they’re minor enough to be mentioned in passing. And if it turns out we’re wrong and all the characters want to do is talk about the events that happened off-screen, well then we’ll go back and write it later.

A writing partner is someone who can help you see around these kinds of corners.

Bottleneck! Dead Ahead!

The writing is mostly back on track now that we’re home from our epic arctic adventure (puffins!), with our word count standing at a fiendishly satisfactory 66,600. We still have a bunch of stubs laid out and waiting, so we can keep steaming along for a while. Jen just completed a scene in a particular POV, so while that voice is warmed up she’ll jump ahead a few scenes to that character’s next appearance. Kent is in exactly the same situation with another character. One of the (many) great things about writing with a partner is the parallel processing.

But, let’s not be hasty.

All this skipping around with the chronology is fine, as long as we’re paying attention. We have another plot thread, which involves a different subset of the cast and therefore will take a bit of a mental shift to pick up right now. That’s why we were thinking of skipping past it. But, the events in that thread’s next few scenes are tightly coupled, which means it doesn’t make sense to divvy them up. So, if we follow the plan where we each stick with the POV that’s warmed up, we’ll create a bottleneck when the third plot thread becomes the only option to work on.

And that’s why we’re not going to proceed that way. Jen will stick to the plan, but Kent will essay the mental shift and pivot to the other thread. Once its first scene is in the can, it won’t be able to create a bottleneck. At that point, Kent can stick with that thread or swing back to the other one (which has more sex in it).

This idea of bottlenecks doesn’t really pertain if you work solo. At most, it can dictate what order you write the scenes in, but you’re going to be the one writing all of them regardless. With a partner comes the need to coordinate. If Jen can’t write scene B until Kent finishes scene A, then we lose the parallel processing advantage.

A writing partner is someone who helps you figure out the most efficient way to tackle working with a writing partner.

Holy Ectoplasmic Residue!

Whilst chugging along on the final (which is to say, middle) installment planned for the Music Novels, we have also been making a lot of great progress developing the Ghost books.

We got to spend a bunch more hours in the Skelleymobile recently, which is not an environment conducive to typing but does lend itself nicely to brainstorming. There was also that time earlier this week when we had no choice but to dine out at Olive Garden (for, like, the third time ever), and while it’s a perfectly adequate restaurant in many ways, it too is a place that’s non-conducive to hammering out prose, yet works pretty well as a venue for a bizarre conversation about the roaming disembodied spirits of the no-longer alive. So we took advantage of that.

The last time we checked in about the Ghosts, everything was very preliminary. But now, the spectral apparition of a plot has begun to coalesce, plus a substantial portion of the cast actually have names! Really cool names, it must be said.

We work in trilogies, that’s just the rules, but this is the first time that we’re going to plot out the whole series before writing any of them. We’ve plotted two books in tandem before, but never three. It’s a little bit scary, even without considering the spooky subject matter.

A writing partner is someone to hold you when your novels go bump in the night.

Just Hold Still, Dammit!

Jen and Kent are hardcore plotters, expending a ton of energy at the beginning of a project to get every last wrinkle ironed out. It is the Skelley way. It makes it a lot easier to divvy up the writing later if both halves of the partnership have a rock solid understanding of how all the pieces fit together.

But back to that “expending a ton of energy” part. Jen is currently in the midst of creating the actual outline. You know, the kind with roman numerals and all that jazz. It’s something she usually enjoys (don’t judge), but this time it’s frustrating her. Events in the timeline keep oozing around and refusing to hold still, and Jen really feels like they ought to know their place by now.

Our process is long and arduous, but not particularly complicated. Usually anyway.

  • Step one is a lengthy series of conversations where we talk through the whole story and take copious notes.
  • Step two is combing through those notes to put everything in order and discard the bits that are obsolete.
  • Step three is to polish the results of step two into a prose outline. For this novel (Sibling of Music Novel) that came to 24 pages (12,000 words), plus an additional couple of pages of notes on the setting.
  • Step four is not always necessary, but we dusted it off for this novel: an actual calendar to track events. Jen went through the prose outline and distributed the events on the calendar to make sure everything lined up properly. Everything seemed to be swell until she started:
  • Step five, which is the current step — the Real Outline. This is the step where the actual structure of the novel starts to come into focus. We look at how the events will break down into actual scenes. There are plenty of facts that we know about the story and our characters that are important, but that don’t justify their own scene. So as Jen works her way along, she’s looking for dynamic and interesting ways to convey some fairly mundane (for now) facts so that they won’t come out of nowhere later when they matter, and feel unearned.
  • Step six will be using the outline/glorified scene list to create the mini scene synopses that we call stubs.
  • Step seven will be the actual composition.

Each step along the way clarifies our story’s structure, uncovers plot holes and magical thinking, and helps us get to know the characters. By looking at things from so many angles, at so many differing magnifications, we find the weak spots before we start to write. It’s a lot of labor up front, but it saves a ton of work in rewrites.

The problem Jen’s encountering is that the events she so painstakingly placed on the calendar in step four are getting shuffled around in step five. It’s nothing so earthshaking that we need to rethink the plot, it’s just that now the calendar will need to be updated to reflect the actual actual flow of events, and that makes Jen sigh.

Having a writing partner means having someone to soothe your fevered brow while you shake your fist at the universe you created.

That Time Jen and Kent Were Writing Two Different Books Together

It’s not all that strange for us to be juggling multiple projects.  The twist this time is that we’re each focusing on one book, just not the same one. Jen is compiling the outline for Sibling of Music Novel while Kent writes the epigraphs for Grandson of Science Novel. A more typical scenario would involve switching between projects every day or two, with the two of us staying mostly synced up on whichever project we switch to.

Another fairly common situation would be where one of us is writing while the other one does research, or designs a cover, things like that. When we’re doing different types of tasks, it’s less noticeable if they’re related to different books.

This feels sorta weird this time, because we are both writing. We tend to ask each other questions out of the blue a lot, and that’s when it’s really noticeable that we’re thinking about different worlds.

For a long time, we would not have even considered this type of multitasking. We very deliberately kept our combined attention on one project at a time. It allowed us to stay immersed in that story world, and our concern was that we’d burn a lot of mental energy spooling it back up again if we got distracted by something else. But as the manuscripts accumulated, life in the Writing Cave got complicated. And it turns out that we’re pretty damn good at keeping multiple worlds spinning in our heads. After a while you even used to it.

Having a writing partner gives you twice the bandwidth for generating warped realities.

2019 Preview

Last week we recapped our 2018. Now it’s time to look ahead and see what the coming twelvemonth will hold in store.

Our top priority will be writing Sibling of Music Novel. The first round of outlining is essentially complete, which does not mean we are yet in possession of anything that resembles an outline. But it does mean we’ll be ready to begin the actual writing pretty soon. Hard to say how long that will take. Our past few projects have been all over the map. Hopefully we can be speedy this time!

After that, we have a couple of good candidates for our attention, depending on which story world we want to focus on. We can stay with the Music series and do an editing pass on Son of Music Novel, or we can pivot back to the Science series where there are two manuscripts that need such treatment.

Deciding which of those worthy endeavors gets our attention first will depend on how our near-future publishing strategy shapes up. 2018 was the year we got an agent, and 2019 will be the year that we adjust our routines accordingly.

And, that means as of now we don’t have an answer for “What book(s) will you release in the coming year?” Everything’s topsy-turvy! But we can say for sure that we’ll be sweating in the writing cave. (Not really, though, because it’s air conditioned.) We will let you know what’s coming just as soon as we find out ourselves. Watch this space for updates.

To sum up, we expect to be busy!

A toast: May this, the year two thousand nineteen, be generous and gentle to you and everyone you love.

How Do These Pedals Work?

It ought to be just like riding a bike. We’ve successfully outlined eight novels, so it really ought to be second nature by now. And yet.

The final edits of Science Novel are in the rearview mirror. Its accompanying short story is resting comfortably and awaiting its own turn under the scalpel. With our to-do list pretty much exhausted, it’s time to close the door on that story universe for a little while and turn our attention to the Music Novels. Specifically Sibling of Music Novel, the middle novel of that series.

Before setting it aside a while back, we’d hammered out most of an outline. The only thing we’d left undefined were the actions of the final, let’s say, quarter of the plot. The part where tension is building and the action is all rising to a rousing finale. So, you know, only the most important part of the novel. No bigs.

This is a busy time of year, as we’re sure you know, and it’s a little busier for us this year due to some family obligations. We’ve been away from the Writing Cave more than usual. But one of the great things about brainstorming is that you don’t need to be sitting at a computer to do it. We’ve managed to have a few relevant conversations in the car, and in various restaurants and hotels. Those have even led to a few notions we’ve liked enough to add to the official Steno o’ Notes. But man oh man we are grinding the gears a bit. The transition from composition and editing to this other part of the writing process is not going as smoothly as we hoped.

Last night Jen dug up the 12-page single-spaced prose outline/synopsis and Kent made himself hoarse reading it aloud. It was a reassuring reminder of how much story we already have, and a very useful refresher. Obviously we should have started with that. Anyway, after story time we moved from the Writing Cave to the Writing Annex, where we jumped back into the brainstorming while Jen wrapped holiday gifts. We expected it to work better than it did. Jen is a million times better at gift-wrapping than Kent is, but it still requires a certain amount of brainpower. And Kent was fighting off a headache while simultaneously trying to take notes on our conversation and tamp down his envy/amazement at Jen’s mad wrapping paper origami skillz (She got the pattern to line up across the seam! More than once!).

It’s important that we keep up a regular work schedule even when things are so higgledy piggledy. Especially then. We’ve accepted that we’re not going to be as productive as we like while we figure out how to ride this particular bicycle again, through this particular obstacle course. But if we keep trying a little bit every day, imagine how easy it will seem when the distractions all clear up!

 

“I Would Read This Book”

While Kent goes off dayjobbing during the muggy sunlit hours, Jen’s “day job” lately is transcribing our notes from the steno pad. She has been embellishing things to a certain degree. The result is a sort of mega-synopsis. It has very sparse description and zero dialog, but the narrative pull is compelling.

When Kent got home and saw the latest installment, he proclaimed, “I would read this book.”

Killjoy that she is, Jen replied, “We have to write it, first.”

Of course she’s right. And that’s going to be fun to do. A shit-ton of work, but fun. Because we already know the story’s broad strokes, we’ll be able to concentrate on bringing its details to life without worrying about whether we’re staying on track.

We’re certainly biased, but we’re jazzed as all hell to see just how un-put-downable this sucker becomes once the character are allowed to actually talk to each other.

Status Report From the Scrivening Annex

Jen and Kent have nearly filled that steno pad, and generated enough colored-paper squares to all but obscure the dining table (and that’s with the board in!). In other words, the preliminary outlining for Sibling of Music Novel is almost complete.

We’ve made a lot of fun discoveries on the way to this point, things we might not have learned about our characters otherwise. Maybe they would have told us this stuff in the thick of the prosening, but we’re pretty sure most of it wouldn’t have come up. It’s oblique to the plot. A lot of it will never wind up on the page, but it defines the space for the things that will be on the page.

This is a story that we’ve known — in elevator-pitch form — for quite a while. Feeling it solidify through the outlining process has been wonderful. The thing that we found ourselves stuck on the longest is one particular week in the timeline. It falls late in the story and involves a unique mix of characters. That combination makes for a lot of corners to try and peer around to see what’s happening up there. Kent was tempted to just leave it vague for now and get started writing, to fly through it by the seat of his pants when he gets there. But Jen calmed him down with some orange slices and we stuck to our process.

A major benefit of all this pre-work, for us, is that we can get stuck sooner. On our first few projects, when we used more of a pantsing approach, we’d routinely get stuck for a period of months. Months. Finding out where the sticky spots are while we’re just sketching is a lot more efficient than running into them in the midst of an actual first draft.

We’re not trying to be the Outline Police or anything, but it’s been a tremendous boon to us.