Category: Plotting & Outlines

Essential blueprinting for your fiction enterprise.

How We Know We’re Doing It Right

Our work sessions of late have swung back into a lot of research about New York City’s landmarks and culture in prior decades. It’s fun research. That’s part of how we know we’re doing it right, although admittedly it’s also a dire threat to any notion of a schedule. Falling down a bottomless image search is all too easy to do.

Naturally, the reason for all this research is so we can invent deeper torment for our characters to endure. They were already pretty pissed off at us about what we have in store for them, and the stuff we’ve come up with this week makes it so much worse. Which is the other way we can tell we’re doing it right: it makes our characters hate us.

There appears to be a link between our enjoyment and the intensification of enmity from certain members of our cast. The more fun we’re having, the more they want to blind us with a hot screwdriver.

Which is our biggest reason for working as a team: to make it harder for our characters to sneak up on us.

 

The Only Reason for Time

Now that our steno pad is 3/4 full and our plot rainbow is a mile long, we feel like we’re almost ready to write up an outline for Sibling of Music Novel. Before we do that, though, we want to make sure we have as many holes filled in as possible. There will always be corners we haven’t seen around, cans of worms we haven’t opened, right up until it’s time to write any given scene, but we like to get as much of that as possible out of the way in the planning stages. The writing goes a lot more smoothly (especially with two of us doing it) when we minimize the number of unknowns.

While Kent’s off at the day job, bringing home the bacon, Jen has spent her afternoons combing through our notes and typing them up in something resembling chronological order. Our brainstorming process is pretty loose, as it should be, and that results in a notebook that is wildly disorganized. Big plot points intermingle with character quirks and setting details. We don’t want to lose any of that little stuff, even if we can hold the broad strokes of the plot in our heads.

Eventually there will be a master document that incorporates everything coherently, no matter how large or small. For now there’s a prose outline for each of the main storylines, and separate documents for setting details and random notes. Each page of the steno pad requires Jen to flit around among these documents, inserting a line or two where appropriate.

Once she’s gotten through all the notes and gives everything a quick spit shine, these documents will give us a good overview of the project and will help us see where we are light on detail.

Our prewriting routine is quite involved, but it’s key to allowing us to write together as a team with minimal headache. What does your process look like?

The Dog Ate My Homework

Our house is overrun with adorable furry demons whose job it is to make it difficult for us to accomplish our writing goals. When the Bandit Lord is not pulling us away from the Writing Cave for a potty break, Lady Marzipan is barking at mysterious intruders only she can sense.

We spend a good deal of time now refereeing the canine drag races that occur in our hallway, and around our sofas, and under the dining room table, then back through the kitchen and down the hallway, with a quick detour into the futon room and back again, around and around. We also spend a good deal of time convincing his Lordship that he shouldn’t chew on the molding, and cleaning up the soggy confetti that he makes out of the cardboard he is allowed to chew on.

And now, instead of just eating up all of our valuable writing time, they’ve moved on to eating our actual writing. We talked before about setting up our new plot rainbow on the table in the dining room, and how well that was working. But then we made the mistake of leaving the sliding door open for a while and the wind (it must have been the wind and not Lady Marzipan’s tail) blew a few of our colorful squares onto the floor. Where they were promptly confetti-ized.

Jen made replacements. It happened again. Sigh.

With visitors coming this weekend we had to clear the table off, so the rainbow is currently safe in a neat pile, secured with a rubber band. The next time we spread it out we’ll have to get clever, buy a couple dozen little paperweights or something.

In the meantime, we bow to the whims of our merciless overlords. Just look at them — so intimidating!

Brainstorm Until It’s Not Fun Anymore

In our preliminary brainstorming sessions for the current work in progress, the ideas were coming out faster than we could jot them down. We couldn’t help but come up with tons of good ideas, like there simply were no other kinds of ideas. The recent brainstorming sessions, on the other hand, have been characterized by phrases like, “But I don’t think that will really work,” and “Not that we would actually want to do it that way.” The few ideas that we did feel good about were things we’d already come up with at least twice, according to our notes.

This is a signal that it’s time to stop brainstorming. Early on, everything is wide open and there’s lots of room for ideas. But the more you flesh things out, the more constraints are piling up. Any really new idea that you throw in will be the enemy of something else that you’ve already decided you like. If you aren’t sure if you like your story that way, then by all means keep storming your brains. But if you have a good basis for a story that you’re looking forward to telling, then move on to another step in the process.

For us, that means laying out a rainbow. So that’s what we’ve been doing, although we’ve broken with tradition by using the dining table for this one rather than doing it on the floor. (Our helpers are far too enthusiastic about rainbows, alas. Plus, floors lack much to recommend them, ergonomically.)

And — it worked! Being able to visualize the flow and structure of the story immediately shook loose a new set of good, usable ideas for us. They’re not only good, they’re compatible.

Working with a partner makes brainstorming much more fruitful and enjoyable, but don’t overuse it. Documenting and visualizing your progress is always helpful, and it becomes essential when you have a partner to communicate with.

 

Inside Out

Due to the weird way we work, the book we are currently plotting will be the middle book in the Music Trilogy. The gap that it will fill is fairly large, so we’re not overly constrained, but there is a finite time period where it can be set, and there are several threads that lead into and out of it that can’t be changed. They can perhaps be adjusted slightly, tuned up a bit. But certain people have to survive the middle book, and certain events have to happen. There’s a forcefield around them.

This is an on-steroids instance of the Pantser’s Complaint. Those who eschew outlines often cite the feeling of being limited, and a loss of motivation to discover the story. With all the big decisions made, they find it hard to engage with the project anymore. Here, we have significant constraints in place before we even get to the outline stage. Oh noes!

But to us, the thrill of composition remains. We love finding captivating ways to say all the things we’ve decided should be said, and we really like not having to make those decisions on the fly.

Seen from a higher altitude, the actual outline is proving very interesting as well. It’s like we have a map showing our start and end points, with just blank paper in between. We’re not trying to create the shortest or safest route. We want something with plenty of unexpected twists and turns and washed-out guardrails to let us plummet to the jagged rocks.

So even though we’ve put the squeeze on ourselves this time by working our way in from the edges, it’s coming along quite nicely. And, predictably, this is something we feel works better with two of us. These early-stage activities are where our partnership feels most dynamic, because the work consists of having conversations.

Once More, With Feeling

After several weeks (and several road trips) of brainstorming and discussion related to Sibling of Music Novel, we came to a natural lull. It was the perfect time to read through the two other books set in the same story universe to both refresh our memories about the characters and plot details, and to look for inspiration.

The two existing books, Music Novel and Son of Music Novel, are both quite hefty, so this read through is taking a while. It would go quicker if we each read silently by ourselves, but Jen reads faster than Kent and she’d finish up first and then sit around being bored. Can’t have that. Plus we like to stay synched up so that we can discuss things more easily. This all means that Kent’s voice has been getting a workout. He’s already finished reading the first book out loud, and he’s halfway through the second. It’s sort of like an audio book and a director’s commentary rolled into one, and we’re quite enjoying it. Maybe Jen a little more than Kent (who is a very good sport about all of this).

We might finish up story time this weekend. Or we might not, because Son of Music Novel is freakin’ huge. Whenever we do finish, we’ll jump back into brainstorming, fully immersed in our story world.

Hitting The Road (Again)

Last week we took another big car trip and spent a couple of nights in a hotel. All this shuttling around on the highways certainly cuts into our writing time.

The fortunate thing is, we’re currently in the stage of our process where we’re least chained to our desks. Our work sessions lately consist of conversation and note-taking, which we can do even while driving. We also take a laptop with us so we can do some research if a question comes up, such as how common a particular type of fingerprint is. (And yes, we are enjoying the idea of someone trying to guess what this book is about based on what we’re researching. Because it’s impossible.)

Having a teammate helps at every step of a project, of course, but this developmental stuff might be the place where it’s the most significant. Conversations are so much more productive when they have more than one participant (plus, there’s someone else in the car who can take notes while you’re busy driving).

So, once again, we’ll advocate for finding yourself a good writing partner. You don’t have to marry them, but in our experience that does bring some nice fringe benefits.

Since We’re Too Lazy to Invent a Time Machine

It had been literally years since we bought anything from eBay, but we broke our streak this week. The world building for Sibling of Music Novel necessitates a lot of oddly specific research and we had to gather materials. The internet makes most research really easy, or at least possible with some digging, and we’ve been taking full advantage. But eventually you run out of ways to rephrase your search query, you know?

Countless youtube videos have been watched, web sites perused, images searched. Both of us can picture the sort of site that would answer all of our questions. Unfortunately that site doesn’t seem to exist. We’re forced to piece our knowledge together from myriad sources and hope that there will be few readers who will know what we get wrong.

But we don’t like to get things wrong, which is why we’ve turned our eye to eBay. You see, we’ve been to Manhattan, but we haven’t been to Manhattan in the 1940s, and that’s what we need information about. Not that the novel will be set in the 40s. Nor will it involve time travel. It’s just that we need a whole lot of detail about that specific time in that specific place. For reasons. So we bought a few vintage guide books and maps to get us started, and we’re planning to watch some movies filmed in the proper era and try to pay attention to the background details more than the plot.

Other areas of research so far: luxury resort hotels (if only we could justify a “research trip”), the floor plan of the Empire State Building, noble gasses, rooftop cisterns, and the earliest days of television.

On the upside, very few of our searches this time are likely to get us added to any watch lists. So there’s that.

Slow and Stubby Wins the Race

Jen writes most of the stubs. It’s not like there’s a union rule or anything, it just sorta feels like it. But it works out better that way for everybody most of the time, partly because Kent is prone to getting too wrapped up in the details. Stubs aren’t supposed to be all that detailed.

This week, there was a bit of a role reversal because Kent wrote some stubs. (And Jen wrote some epigraphs, which are usually in Kent’s wheelhouse.) He was supposed to just write a scene, but it’s an actiony scene and the stub Jen handed him said little beyond “they fight.” So, he decided to flesh out the stub first. Then he decided to make it into three stubs.

As he worked, he commented to Jen several times that he was reining himself in on the details. Which made her wonder why he didn’t just get into the flow and write the scene itself. He had his reasons. Basically, the same reason that it ended up being three stubs. They still came out a little too detailed for the Rune Skelley stub specification.

Jen wonders if we shouldn’t just call the stubs the scenes. This could be an elegant way of avoiding Kent’s tendency to overwrite action scenes, and save us the trouble of sanding off all the baroque curlicues during revision. But Kent is pretty sure he can punch them up a great deal and still hand in something relatively aerodynamic.

Having a writing partner means being able to rely on somebody to handle the tasks you’re less proficient at. And when you stray outside your comfort zone, it means there’s someone to coach you.

Don’t Go There

We’re getting really close to completing the first draft of Grandson of Science Novel. We have also been tinkering with Son of Science Novel a bit in parallel. Is it still a first draft, or have we begun revisions? That’s a deep question, and is not the topic of this week’s post.

The topic is, how much does the main character know about the dark dealings of the villain? Is it possible for the hero to know too much?

This villain does some really ugly shit. Quite a variety of badness, actually, most of it in secret of course. The good guys have to dig to find out just how awful their adversary is, and in the current draft they uncover the shittiest deeds. But, we’re going to pare back the amount that they’re able to learn. They’ll know enough.

There is a school of thought that would say this is a mistake, that every source of conflict and tension has to be maxed out. Um, no. The sources of conflict and tension that you want to capitalize on are only those that form the basis of the story you’re telling. If you have, say, ten things happening that might drive conflict, all of which are pushed as hard as you can, then the two or three that resonate with your theme are drowned out.

This does not mean that you shield your character. It’s not about avoiding real conflict, but about making choices of what conflicts your character will face. In our case, to give our hero this knowledge would force the entire rest of the plot to be about that. It’s so awful, so upsetting, that it then must become the thing driving the hero to seek justice, or else we pivot to a story of guilt over not seeking justice. Or else (if we try to pretend these issues aren’t there) we get a story with a main character who seems unconcerned about injustice.

The tale in which our hero knows those details is a different story than the one we’re telling. Of course, the villainy itself remains. That’s not up for debate. All we’re doing is withholding some information from our protagonist, which lets us put her into more nuanced peril (moral and mortal).

When you need to figure out the thorny dilemmas of your characters and your plot, it’s very helpful to talk them through with someone who’s familiar with the project. Just another way that a good writing partner makes everything better.