Outlining

Hi everyone,

I have outlined my new YA novel once from beginning to the end with LOTS and LOTS of gaps. I am on a second pass now. My first pass was a detailed spread sheet in excel. I am mostly concentrating on the character arc of my two main characters. Right now, it’s dual POV but I reserve the right to change that if one character outshines the other. On my second pass I am putting it into plotter.

What have I learned?

1)    For starters, it’s important to get to the end of the story and then return to the beginning. It’s a process that, like deleting words in line edits, is done in a series of passes. It’s easy to get stuck in the middle if you must fully flesh out everything for each beat/scene before moving on. For me, that’s not how it works. There will be gaps—things I don’t know. A lot of incompletes that I have to be okay with leaving behind as I move on. Getting to the end informs the beginning and informs that tricky middle. So, I’m filling out whatever I can. I absolutely don’t care about what I can’t fill out, what I don’t know yet. I am forcing myself to keep moving forward.

2)    The entire outline process is simply me telling the story to myself again and again until I’ve nailed it down enough to write it. It depends on the person, I suppose, how many times you need to tell the story to yourself until you are ready to write. It depends on the writer how much needs to be locked down before the actual novel writing begins.

My goal is to lock down as much of the story as I can before writing. Until there is nothing I can add without diving into my story world and writing it.

This all means that, I told the story to myself ONCE in excel.

I am going to tell the story to myself a SECOND time in plottr and in more detail because on the second telling of my story it will get tighter.

When I am happy with how I told it in Plottr. I will tell it to myself a THIRD time, in some OTHER form. A shorter one perhaps. Or maybe a detailed synopsis, who knows, as I am discovering my outlining process as I go, but what I am convinced of, is that outlining is you telling the story to yourself again and again, each time with more details (and different details as the story forms).

Each rendition I write, in whatever form speaks to me at the time, will make (and has made), my story tighter and tighter. It’s a funny process. Repeating and repeating, details changing, people changing, the story changing with each new version.

It’s fun and stressful at the same time. The wonderful advantage of this detailed outline is that I have discovered new things without the entire process of WRITING the novel, I have deleted things that worked once, that no longer work—this was fun since I only deleted about 5 minutes of effort instead of 5 WEEKS of effort.

It’s stressful because it’s easier to discover a story by writing all of the characters—for me at least. I worry, sometimes though, that I won’t be able to fill in the gaps later. That in the end, when it comes to writing the story, I won’t be ABLE to follow the outline. And I will have wasted my time. But in those moments, I trust in the process. I trust because I want it to work. I want to have a better, easier, faster, less painful revision stage. I want to throw away what doesn’t work HERE in the outline before I’ve gone to the effort of writing it and tweaking it and line editing it, just to discover that oops, I didn’t need that scene at all. How did I not notice that? Mostly, I realize, because it was an amazing scene and its amazingness covered up that it was completely UNNECESSARY-ahhhhhhhhhh. And of course, once you take out a scene, you have a knock-on effect that sometimes implodes a novel. And requires months of fixing. I want to have my epiphanies here in the outlining stage. Where they cost less and produce more.

I should note, that I’m also reading The Anatomy of Story 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller by John Truby as I go and it is invaluable to my plotting progress. When I’m finished the book, I will do a diary entry about what I found useful in Truby’s book—what worked for me and what didn’t.

But, yep, that’s all from me.

I’ll let you know how it’s going next week.

Happy writing,

Joanne.