Plotline Evolution
Dwight Eisenhower said that plans are useless but planning is essential. So it is with outlining a novel and then actually writing it.
The outline says certain events will happen in a certain order, but then while writing the scenes it doesn’t feel right, so small adjustments have to be made. Those little changes add up along the way, and sometimes the plot moves off in a totally unexpected direction. If you have a solid outline, you’ll probably be able to swerve around obstacles and get things back on course. Or, perhaps you’ll opt to pursue the new path you’ve found along the way.
There’s another level where things can evolve under your fingertips. The general shape of the events might not change, but you still end up with a radically different story than the one you thought you’d set out to tell.
Does the propulsion come from wondering who the villain will kill next, or from trying to figure out who the killer is? The same basic tale can be flipped between these states by a single critical detail: whether or not you tell the reader who the bad guy is. That decision could move your story to a different genre entirely, without even altering who kills whom.
What looks like a suitable source of action and tension in the outline might turn out not to fulfill its promise in prose. In a collaboration, this is something to talk through with your partner as it develops, especially if you’re divvying up the work and each writing a subset of the scenes. If you rely on the outline as the firm bedrock of your project, but your partner has made adaptations on the fly without telling you, then the whole first draft could fall apart halfway through.
But as always, there’s an upside to having a partner to help cope with the challenge. As long as you communicate you’ll avoid the catastrophe described above, and you’ll be able to brainstorm a solution that makes you both happy. Kent and Jen like to go for walks together, and use the time to discuss these kinds of shifts in the plot. How do you debug your outlines? What do you do when you feel the story pulling you down a different road?
This raises an interesting conundrum, I think is huge when it comes to a collaboration. The last collaboration I worked on was a short story with my brother. He lives in MA and I live in PA. (That sounds a little science fictiony right there if you forget that MA is Massachussettes and PA in Pennsyltucky.) I wrote a line, he wrote a line, then I wrote a line… etc. We brainstormed and discussed the plot, characters etc… before doing this and it was an interesting experiment. The cool part is that it kept us both on task and the story going in the same direction. But it was challenging to keep momentum with the writing, and of course it took much longer than other methods. When going solo, I tend to just run with the changes as they pop up and see where it goes. Sometimes, this results in backtracking and a lot of extra work, but sometimes its worth it.