mapping your thinking

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Mapping the Inevitable

I didn’t use to bother with outlines when writing. The story would just tell itself, right? I’d always know what was supposed to come next. Or it would surprise me, which would be even better. Telling the story to myself as if I didn’t know it ahead of time.

Ahem.

I have come to the conclusion that it is, in fact, much more efficient to know what the story is going to say before you write it. Which of course demands the mastery of an entirely different skill. The previously-ignored fine art of outlining.

Outlining can be a very tricky balancing act. If you keep your outline too loose and fancy free, it doesn’t help you a heckuva lot as you try to keep plot, timeline, location, and who did what to who straight. Or to whom. If you explore the other extreme and go in for obsessive detail, you might just as well write the damn story. I find I vary in approach depending on where I am in the story, and how long the story is.

Before I sit down to write, I think for at least a month about what I’m going to write, making random notes. For a novel, I generally start out with an idea of what happens at the beginning and what the ending should be. How to get from Point A to Point B is the tricky bit.

Again before first putting pen to manuscript I make a theme outline. I decide what the major themes of the book will be, and make separate outlines for each, listing which characters are involved and what the major events should be driving those issues forward, in what likely order.

Then, just before beginning the manuscript, I try to link the theme outlines together into a blueprint for a logical beginning and set of expositional early chapters. That generally gets me through the first hundred pages, after which point I usually sink into total confusion.

Is this guy married or not? What did I name this character again? What day is it? What’s the month again? When’s the last time I mentioned this guy? Oh God, I forgot all about her! I should invent a character like this. Wait a second, I already did. Where the hell is everybody anyway? WHY DON’T I WRITE THESE THINGS DOWN?!

In truth, I have started writing these things down. I keep a character list beside me as I write, adding names as I come up with characters. In my manuscript, I make a notation of the date and day of the week at the beginning of each chapter. I’ve discovered this is the only way to stay sane about these details.

As anyone who has actually been reading what I’ve been posting must have noticed, I have a tendency to overpopulate my books. Sometimes the lunatics do take over the asylum and I lose the book. I reach a point where I’m servicing the various groups of characters I’ve thrown in, no longer with a conception as to why they’re necessarily there to further the plot. Sometimes they’re not. At which point the book dies, sometimes after as many as 200 pages of manuscript.

But I don’t throw out whatever concept made me start writing the thing in the first place. If it’s got any legs, I generally get back to it in some form or another later. With the knowledge that I need to keep down the number of voices telling the story to say it right.

In this regard, I’ve recently made an interesting discovery.

If, after 100 pages or so the story is still working and the crowd scenes aren’t too confusing, I can then sit down and write a detailed outline of what should happen to bring the book to its inevitable, previously conceived conclusion. Generally I do this by date. I develop a timeline for the rest of the story, decreeing these events should happen in this order on these dates, and listing the characters involved in each event. Usually that works.

But on the book I’m working on right now, I’m trying a new variation.

For one thing, this book is one of those treatments where I’m combining no less than three previous plotlines that failed, and doing my best to keep the cast down to functional numbers to make them work here to produce one unified story. Because the ideas were good ones to begin with.

I’m coming up on 175 pages of manuscript written. I never got this far into it before on any of the three previous attempts, but I’m getting a bit nervous I can hold it all together to see it through to the end. I’ve got a good conception of the climax, and the four characters who are central to that finish. But how exactly to get from where I am now to there …

I’ve got seven groups of characters exploring different themes converging to produce the climax I want. And I am definitely at the point where I need to work out exactly how that full convergence is going to take place for the book to proceed intelligently. I’ve been clever enough to only use characters that actually contribute to the plot for a change. Now how do I organize them to pull it all together?

I could do what I already mentioned. Organize the upcoming events by dates. There are seven days left in the story. I can’t ignore that, but somehow I don’t find that adequate to the complexity of this particular thriller.

I could do a more detailed theme outline at this point. Not a bad idea, but not adequate to the detail I need to know regarding event order and character relations.

I could just list the four major characters that converge for the climax of the book and build up a timeline and event list around them …

That seems reasonable to me, but when I sit down and try it I discover they’re too central to what’s going on. It’s difficult to separate what one means to another to make a clear list of necessary events to develop.

So I started making lists of the secondary characters in each theme, and how what the major characters did affected them. Bingo!

The central characters are the prime motivators for all action in the story. But to get a clear picture of the effects those characters drive into motion, I have to look at the secondary characters to list the consequences of the actions being accomplished. Those consequences happening to the characters around them are the clearest outline of what the central characters are up to that I feel I can come up with for this particular plot. I mixed these fifth business lists with a timeline detailing when the secondary characters experienced their fallout, and the main characters’ actions fell neatly into place.

From these breakdowns, I can see the logical order in which to complete the first draft of the manuscript, getting the full story down on paper at last. Once it’s down, I can always go back and fix things as necessary, with a detailed big picture to work from.

Because there are some aspects of this process that outlines will not help you with. Such as rhythm, for example. That you pretty much have to wait until you have the story written to see clearly. Rhythm’s more of a matter of how does it read rather than how do I write it?

And just for the record, I don’t think it’s any easier to outline using only a few characters in your story rather than the armies I tend to employ. If you’ve only got a couple of voices, they have to say that much more. You’re still cramming the same amount of event per page into the book.

It’s nice when it does all flow out from the pen. But at my age, even if you get a vision of how it should all come out perfectly in your head to begin with, you better write down an outline anyway. Those beautiful details might not still be there five minutes later.

And trust me. You’ll never remember everyone’s names.

*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

The Twitchy Gal comes to its conclusion, the body still spasming a bit, with an Interlude posted on Monday and the end, Chapter Thirty-Seven coming on Friday, December 19th at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

At last. The absolute final word on Reality Fiction One. And the observation that calm things down as much you are able to at any given moment, the twitchiness truly never dies.