Category: Writing

The Final Installment--in which the book gets finished and a party is thrown.

Further Chapters: This happens concurrent with the following section. In essence it’s very simple, put in-scene the narrative you’ve developed. In practice it’s messy. You may find out that one of your clever ideas doesn’t work. Or, if you’re fortunate enough to find a good critic to read your working draft, they may point out things that need to be changed to make a better story. For one novel not all that long ago, I scrapped two chapters worth of working outline and started over. I kept some of the same events, but shifted the emphasis and removed the supporting characters entirely to emphasize the central role of the protagonist.

Advanced Blocking: This may or may not be necessary depending on your own individual process. I find that when I’m having trouble with a scene it usually means that I need to take a step back from the actual writing and figure out what I’m trying to achieve with a scene and how best to achieve it. So I might put together something like “Chapter 12, Scene one” with a description of what I want to happen and why, then follow with “scene two,” etc. until I’ve fully blocked out the chapter.

Finish/Clean-up/Ongoing Rewrite: Once the first draft is finished (if you haven’t already) it’s time to go back and clean up any messes made by the changes that will inevitably have drifted in from the initial conception and do things like throwing in foreshadowing for a scene not originally anticipated. A person can also do all of this as they go, going back and inserting whatever adjustments that need to be made as soon as they occur, and this is actually the model I follow though I don’t necessarily recommend it. For many writers what it leads to is a dead stall where they are continually rewriting their first chapters and never actually moving forward.

Celebrate: This is key. If you’ve finished a book you owe yourself a dinner out at the very least, and possibly a blow-out party.

A Final Note: I can’t emphasize enough that this is only one way to reach the goal of a finished book. I know writers who have no idea what’s going to happen with the story from day-to-day and who just “follow my characters around and see what happens” and who write excellent novels. I know writers who would be paralyzed by my model, sinking hundred of hours into blocking and outlines and not working on the text at all. Think of this as one possible starting point. Use the parts of it that make sense or help you move forward, discard those that don’t.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog May 24 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Part 2–in which I talk about actually starting work on the book. Okay so this is a bit of cheat because I do do some of the initial writing in tandem with the earlier stuff.

Three Chapters: At some point in the process, beginning as early as halfway through basic blocking or anywhere thereafter, I need to actually start writing the book so that I can get a handle on who my characters are and the style I’m going to use to write the story. I find that I am often surprised about some of the details of the story and characters both here and later, despite the fact that I have a very good idea of what the story will look like in overview. I typically start these chapters during the blocking process and finish them in tandem with the basic narrative outline as the two inform each other.

Note: Three is not entirely an arbitrary number, because the basic book proposal format is three chapters (~50 pages) and a detailed narrative plot outline. As a writing tool, three chapters is purely a suggestion as it may well take longer than this to really figure out where the story is going to go and how it will get there. In an adult-length novel ~100,000 words, I will usually nail this down somewhere between 15-20,000. First time authors would be advised to have a completed manuscript before submitting the proposal version in any case.

Working Outline: This is a very different critter from the narrative outline. Here my goal is not to tell the story to a third party reader, but rather to blueprint it for myself. It will include both the events of the story and the structural reasons for those events. So, it might include something like “Draft student into school. Establish teachers, also the student TAs.” This tells me that at this point in this chapter I need to write several short scenes showing my lead character in his classes. One of the purposes of these scenes is to establish some of my other characters and make them distinct. The depth of description in a working outline will vary widely from author to author, and should include everything that you think is important in the scene at the minimum level of detail necessary for you to remember it. This isn’t the story itself and all the time I spend here is time that I don’t have to work on the actual finished product. Generally, the more inexperienced the writer, the greater the detail they should put into this sort of outline.

A working outline should at the very least lay out all the major events. In my case, I like to lay it out chapter by chapter. For Black School what I did was looked at my first three chapters to get an idea of what my chapter length was going to be (this can vary wildly depending on the story) and then mapped it against the max number of words. YA is short: 30,000 at the low end up to 75,000 at the extreme high end. I chose to shoot for 60,000 as a ceiling and to bring it in shorter if possible. That meant 16-20 chapters. Just getting in all the events listed in the narrative outline took about 14 chapters leaving me 2-6 chapters for unexpected surprises. I determined this by looking at the events in the narrative outline and seeing how much space they had taken up in my three demonstration chapters. This is an extremely inexact science, as one event might be a paragraph in narrative because of its importance, but only a short scene in text, while another might be a sentence in narrative, but a chapter and a half in text.

To Be Continued (As always YMMV)

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog May 24 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

How do you put together a novel? There are 1,001 and one ways, every one of them right. I thought I’d talk about how I do it in hopes that it might be of some use to others, or at least a good place to have a discussion of ways and means. So here’s the first part of my process using the book Black School as my model.
Before I start writing the actual book.

Conception of idea: What do you want to write about? This is question one. In my case I usually start with a world or magic system. Starting with a character or a scene or a situation all work too. It helps if you can articulate the idea in a sentence–I want to write about ___________. Or a pitch “World War II with sacrifice magic and dark fey Nazis” for example. That’s a gross oversimplification, but when I say it, my listeners will have an instant sense of where I’m going, and so do I.

Basic blocking: Write out the idea in some detail. Shoot for at least two to five single spaced pages. Put flesh on the bones of the one-sentence description above. Try and think through the ramifications of the ideas, i.e. How would a military magic school work when the magic is built around sacrifice? How big a school? How many students? How many teachers? Where is the school? What is its relationship with the local military? Etc.

By the time I reached the end of this process for The Black School I knew the number of buildings on the campus and what their purpose and design was, my total student body, student rank in relation to general military, class schedule, dorm arrangements, etc. That let me open the first day of the book knowing where my lead character had to be and when, if he followed his schedule. This is not an exhaustive list of everything I needed to know, but it gives the flavor. I come back to this and add to it all through the writing of the novel as more details become clear.

Narrative Outline: What is my actual story? In my case I started with a solid idea of where I wanted the story to start, where I wanted it to end, what kind of general transformation I wanted in my main character, and who that character was. That’s a good start for this model. Other models can work just as well and may mean knowing a lot less about the overall story.

For the narrative outline I typically end with a five page overview (standard length in 12pt Courier). In this case, a page on the school, magic system, and main character, to set the scene. Then I started with my opening scene and wrote a very loose description of events over the next four pages, introducing new characters as they came into the story.

The outline had to answer the following questions: What does the main character want? What do they need? What are they going to get? What obstacles do they have to overcome to get there? What do they have to give up to get what they need? How are they going to fail on the way? Failure is key to plot. If the main character doesn’t fail from time to time, then there’s no dramatic tension or payoff when they succeed.

The final version of the narrative outline should tell the main points of the story in a voice as close to the actual fiction as possible.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog May 23 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

During  my original run of outline posts over at Wyrdsmiths, my friend and fellow author Lyda Morehouse brought up something that I felt was quite important

Lyda said. “It might not matter what you call it, but when I first started writing novels I felt I HAD to outline like that and it pretty much scared the crap out of me.”

This is the most important thing to know about outlines:

If outlines don’t work for you, or if you need to call them something else, or construct them in a different way—say as clusters of words on a whiteboard, do that. There are a 1,001 ways to write a novel, every one of them right. If something works for you, do it. If not, don’t let anyone tell you that it should. Move on and find something that does work. Everything we say here is meant by way of suggesting things that may help, not as laying out the one true path to novel success.

Lyda does things in her process that would drive me over the edge and vice-versa and yet both methods produce novels that sell. The only thing that really matters processwise is that you write and that you finish at least some of what you write.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 30 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Outline, a personal lexicon:

Sketch/Brainstorm: When I have a new idea for a story I always write it down in brief and tag on ideas for expanding the idea into something with a plot, characters, and fully realized setting. This can run anywhere from three sentences for a short or poem to two or three pages for a multi-book idea. I have hundreds of these in my ideas file, including probably 30-40 novel outlines sufficiently fleshed out to start writing.

Working: When I actually start in on a new project I take the sketch outline and expand it to something that gives me a good idea of the first third of the story, a rough idea of the middle bits and a good handle on the ending. How much work this is depends on how fully fleshed out the sketch outline was. This will typically run around 3-5 pages and include notes to myself along with the narrative paragraph blocks–things like “establish ruthlessness in dialogue here,” or “she will return in book two as a ghost.”

Timeline: In order to keep the days of the week, dates, moon phases, holidays, etc. organized, I almost always create a timeline for each novel with important events attached to specific days and dates and sometimes times of day or other time indicators. I do this both for the arc of the story and for historical and future events relative to the story. That last part is where it becomes more like other outlines as I use this as another type of sketch/brainswtorming tool.

Ongoing: As I’m writing, I constantly update the working outline with ideas for upcoming bits of business, plot points, character nuggets, and magic system chunks. At some point, generally when I hit the place where the working plot goes all sketchy I will sit down and lay out a chapter-by-chapter scene-by-scene outline for what happens from there to the end of the book. This can run as much as 30 pages single spaced.

Length: This is a specialized form of ongoing outline. By the time I move to the ongoing outline I generally have a very good idea of the book’s natural chapter length which can vary widely depending on all sorts of factors including number of POV characters, type of POV, and target audience–I generally write shorter chapters for YA. What this allows me to do is take my ongoing outline and figure out how long the book is likely to be based on chapter length and how much material needs to go into each chapter and scene. More importantly, it allows me to add or subtract story elements to help me achieve a target length–I’m usually within a thousand words of target length when I finish a draft. Since writing to length can be very important to editors and for specific markets, this is an enormously valuable tool and simple to use. Do I have too many chapters? Collapse some scenes and ideas together. Do I not have enough, open some scenes out into full chapters or add others to achieve effects I hadn’t thought I’d have room for.

Narrative/Proposal/Pitch: This is largely a sales tool, though I also use it to do brainstorming/sketch work for books that are part of a proposal but not yet written. These have to have a very specific form and often have set lengths–particularly for newcomers to the field. They can run from 1-5 pages either single or double spaced depending on submission guidelines and they must be in present tense (with the exception of quoted material from the book). They also can’t keep secrets.

2013 Update: The last couple of books I’ve pretty much taken the narrative outline and worked off that, with with my ongoing outline done as voice notes and bits thrown into the text at the end of the book, and my timeline bits tossed into the master timeline for Fallen Blade. After novel fifteen (Broken Blade) I moved into a looser process. I still use all the processes described here, I’ve just gotten much better at doing them in my head.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 28 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

I started to write a comment in Sean Michael Murphy’s post on outlines, but it quickly turned into Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch—my chief use of outline is as a book writing tool…book writing tool and book selling tool..selling and writing… My two main uses for an outline are book writing and book selling…and structuring. My three uses are… and so on. Now it’s become so big that I’m actually going to do it as a two or three part front page post.

Over the years I’ve become a militant outliner. My first two books were written off the cuff, and though I still love the bones of both stories, I can see how knowing where I was going from the beginning would have produced a better end product. My third had a crude outline, and my fourth had a cruder one. Since then, I’ve gotten steadily more efficient and focused with outlines and it’s led to big improvements in writing speed and quality.

Brief digression: I hated outlining in college. Absolutely hated it. I would go to great lengths not to have to write outlines for papers, even going back and writing outlines post paper in classes that required them so that it looked as though I had followed the desired process. To all the professors who tried to get me to outline back then, mea culpa, you were right, I was wrong.

2013 update: second brief digression. The last couple of books I haven’t outlined as completely on paper, but that’s mostly because I can hold an entire book in my head much better now, and I do much of my outlining as voice notes these days.

Back to the main topic. I use many different types of outlines in my work (updated to add timeline):

Sketch/Brainstorm
Working
Timeline
Ongoing
Length
Narrative/Proposal/Pitch

These each have their own foibles and uses, and I’ll get into that in part II tomorrow.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 28 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)