jdparadise said:
I like to outline. Well, no, I hate to outline, but I do it anyway.
Interesting post, JD!
Ithe past, I never used outlines--which is probably why it took me decades to actually finish a novel after a lot of false starts.
My problem has been that I'm very good at writing individual scenes or episodes, but I wasn't able to link them into a larger story. What finally tuned me around was going back to school, majoring in history, and figuring out how to write 20-35 page research papers for the first time in my life.
I kept ending up with unruly stacks of paper I couldn't keep track of, and long, meandering first drafts that took forever to wrestle into shape. Finally, in frustration, I took a pair of scissors and cut apart the first draft of a 25-page paper that had been giving me nightmares. I cut it into paragraphs, and then laid the resulting slips of paper out on a table, shuffling them around until I had an order that made sense. I had to re-write a few of those paragraphs, and break some of them in two; I also realized what I was missing and thus needed to write from scratch so I could fill in the holes.
A paper that had taken me six weeks of agony just to get to an ugly, crippled monster of a first draft ended up going together very quickly after I hacked it up--I was finally able to see how the pieces would go together. I had the second draft done in a week.
So the next time I had to write a big paper, I decided to work with it as separate pieces, rather than one big monster, from the very beginning. I wrote rough paragraphs on blank index cards, getting down the general idea I was trying to convey in each paragraph, and a few supporting notes (with references). Since the cats kept knocking the cards off the dining-room table, I made a big (4x8') bulletin board, and began sticking cards up on it, trying to find the best order for them. It took me three weeks of fiddling with it, adding more cards, making more elaborate notes on others, and then standing back and staring at the whole thing before I sat down and started typing it out. I had a decent first draft done in five days, with much less pain. (The footnotes were, as always, the biggest headache. One of the things that made me happiest about quitting academia to write fiction is that I no longer have to cite references.)
I'm taking the same approach with a novel right now. I'm doing research for a historical fantasy, but at the same time I have a contemporary urban fantasy in mind and I'm using the note card method to try and figure it out. Every time I think of a scene, I write the bare bones of it on a 3x5 card, in very direct "this is what happens" language. Sometimes there will be a line of dialogue or two, if I think of a joke or something clever that really works, but most of it is pure Joe-Friday-just-the-facts-m'am.
I keep sticking cards with different scenes up on the bulletin board. This story is missing a major plot component right now because as much as I know about the villain, I still don't really know what he's trying to dominate or why (all of my options so far have just seemed cheesy and cliched). But I keep writing scenes and adding cards, and as I do so I keep having those "aha!" moments when I realize that a minor character ought to be a major one, or two characters who weren't going to meet really should, or that I've had another insight about magic and its limitations that spurs another idea for another notecard (or two, or three, or a half-dozen...). Eventually, the villain's goals will make themselves known.
I know I'm not the only one by far who plots with notecards like this, but it's already been incredibly helpful. Being able to
see the way scenes relate to each other and move them around at will, or add new cards, or toss some of them out is taking a lot of the pain out of plotting. I did it with a (not very good) novel I wrote last summer, and as I did it, breaking the book down into sections and chapters was easy. If there were plot holes or if a scene didn't seem to fit, it was obvious. If I was leaning too heavily on one character and not giving enough space to others, that showed up, too.
When I sat down and typed out the contents of all the cards, in order, I had my plot outline. From there, it was just a matter of sitting down every day and making it into a novel. It isn't a good one--it was a leftover attempt at writing "literary" fiction that I had started five or six years ago--and halfway through I realized I was writing about a bunch of well-meaning but ultimately self-centered middle-class white people who annoyed me. I could have turned it into satire, but by the time I thought to do so, I didn't care. The book lacks heart, but I
finished the bloody thing. Since then, I've decided to rescue the one character I really liked, turn him into a wizard, and stick him in the urban fantasy (where he already seems to be thriving). The rest of it shall remain desk ballast forevermore.