inverarity | Never Believe Your Lying Outline

I'm reading several books right now, but probably won't finish them until next week or so.

Well, for those of you who don't come for the book reviews, but are hoping for Alexandra Quick tidbits, I have no books to review (though I've got a couple more self-pubbed ebooks to snark about), so this is another of my long rambly self-indulgent author's posts.

I'm on chapter three of AQATSA right now. Yes, it's been slow going, with me working on it off and on, but I've picked up the pace a bit lately. I am having some of the same problems I had with AQATDR (namely, trying to work out plot holes, and making certain events fit into the story in a plausible, organic way), but they are coming earlier than they did in the previous book. Also, this being the fourth book, there is less that I can "punt" to be explained later in the series, and I have to be more careful that I don't write myself into a corner.

I do have some evil ideas which are even eviler than my original ideas.

Spend a little time on writing forums or reading books about writing, and you'll learn that the "outline or no outline?" debate is right up there with "literary vs. genre fiction" for eliciting impassioned arguments to a question that has no right answer. Some writers outline meticulously before they begin writing, and already know every key event in their book right up to the ending before they type the first sentence. I really envy them. Other writers just wing it all the way through. Stephen King apparently does this -- he starts out with a vague idea and lets his characters tell him what happens next.

I'm somewhere in between. I try to outline, but what I really have written down before I write a book is a list of important events and plot twists, and how I want it to end, and other random details. The rest is stuff that I cannot, no matter how much time I spend thinking about it, work out in my head until I get there. By which time many events on my list have been added, deleted, or completely changed.

This is actually one of the things that slows my writing down. Because two oppositional phenomena are at work here:

1. When I have hit an obstacle -- a plot hole, or a difficulty in making something happen that I want to happen -- I tend to stop writing while I try to work it out in my head. And sometimes I spin my mental wheels for days with no resolution, until I sit down again and start writing.

2. If I do sit down and start writing, even if I still have a mess in front of me and in my head, I start with a sentence, and come up with another, and pretty soon I've managed to work my way through it, or at least added another ten pages to the story. Sometimes it's all crap and the plot hole is still there and I'll have to go back and rewrite, but at least I've made forward progress, and things tend to work themselves out eventually.

So, the lesson here is that I should just keep writing and not spend so much time trying to plan what I will write, but being an obsessive plotter, I just can't make myself comfortable with, "Oh, I'll just start writing and see what happens next."

Also, I have recently learned to my amazement that most writers just plow ahead all the way to the end without doing much rewriting of their story. Oh, sure, they'll go back and fix details, change names, add foreshadowing, occasionally pull a section forward or move one back as later parts of the book resolve themselves, but for the most part, they do not open their document and reread chapter one and rewrite several paragraphs, then move on to chapter two and realize that some of it needs to be rewritten and do so, and so on until they get to their current ending point, whereupon they've spent much of that day's writing time rewriting and not actually adding a new chapter. No, they manage to actually finish the book and then start revising!

Believe it or not, that was quite a revelation to me. The idea of just... writing the whole thing, messy as it is, even when I know there's stuff earlier in the book that needs to be fixed feels to me like building a house knowing that the foundation is crooked but saying, "Oh, don't worry about it, once we're done we'll go back and fix that."

I know that analogy is not sound, and if I can break my persistent rewriting habit I'll probably get a lot more done a lot faster. I'm working on it.

(Although what would really help me write more would be if I were given a computer with no Internet access. No, don't tell me to unplug the cable or turn off the wireless card. If I can unplug it, I can plug it back in, and I will.)

So, anyway, everything I said about individual books also applies to Alexandra's entire seven-book arc. I know how it ends, I know what important events will happen along the way. Most of the decisions about who lives and who dies (and shipping) were made by the time I started book two. But some of the events, I'm not sure yet how I'm going to get there, and there are some plot holes I've opened up that I'm still working out. So the final form of the series will not be the same as my current outline, just as the final versions of AQATLB and AQATDR veered pretty significantly from my outlines in places.

It's really hard to write a series and keep it on course. Rowling had problems starting with book four. Then there's Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin. (I've never actually read any of Jordan's books, and I've never read any of Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, either, though I'm thinking about starting it because everyone says how awesome it is. Except he's also apparently written himself into a corner so that it's taking him over five years to write the next book, and I also remember how Wild Cards descended into carnography and random butchery of main characters and I've heard Martin tends to do that with SoIaF, too.)

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yeah, I can't outline, at all, for anything. I guess I'm just the kind of person who thinks by writing. The planning I do takes place mostly in my head--I figure, it's much easier to change it if it's just thoughts, whereas if I write it down it becomes more set in stone, and I like flexibility.

I actually think both outlining and not-outlining have their strengths and weaknesses. In particular, the former is probably better for plot-heavy complicated works, whereas the latter likely works well for more character-driven stories. But ultimately, it seems like personal taste to me. To each their own.

And while I'd HIGHLY recommend the A Song of Ice and Fire series, you might want to wait until he finishes the fifth book before starting. I hear the reason the fourth and fifth ones took so long is because he had to scrap a planned timeskip, but the ten years he's taking to write them is really bordering on the absurd.

(do I get an award for butchering verb tense in that last sentence?)

-TealTerror

I think authors tend to become tighter and more conscious plotters as they get older. My favourite example is Dickens, where we go from the virtually plotless Pickwick Papers, through things like Martin Chuzzlewit, where he thinks nothing of suddenly sending his protagonist to America because he had run out of things to make him do and wanted to have some fun at the expense of the Americans, to really disciplined and successful plots like those of Dombey and Son and Bleak House, where you hear the clock ticking dramatically away on every foreboding or secret development to come, and everything that happens at every point until the end is a function of what has been posited at the beginning.

I don't outline - so far. I am trying to learn, because it has become clear to me that this is the cause of my dramatic failure as a long story writer. I have written dozens of short stories - good ones, too, I like to think - because a short story allows a single good idea to be worked out as much by intuition as by anything else. And the idea is all I have when I start. I could point to you the exact place in the street where I was standing when I got the idea for the undoing spell that is the climax of The First Nymphadora, but everything else, including the heroic stance and actions of the protagonist, came as I was writing it. Of course, looking back, it is clear that it all depends on the ending; the ending itself would not have been what it was if the protagonist had not been so heroic and admirable. Conversely, when I started another favourite of mine - It Was All on Account of the Little Russian Girl - all I was clear about was that Umbridge and Minerva had history - someone else had suggested that in a comments threat in FA. I was not even clear that it was going to be homosexual jealousy. Then I came across the pictures of a small Russian woman, interesting more than beautiful, and I had my start, and the rest came out as I was writing - mostly from my own experience.

Sometimes I literally don't know what is going to happen to the protagonists until I am actually writing it. And that is particularly the case with climaxes. When I got started My Father: An Episode from the First Voldemort War, I knew quite clearly that it was to be about a decent young man victimized by a soulless, psychopathic father; but it was writing out the increasing degrees of constriction, use, abuse, and deceit, that led me to realize that there was only one possible end to the story - by all accounts one of my more successful climaxes. And in the case of Singing over the Waters, I at first did not even know who was going to feature in it! All I knew is that I had a mood - something to do with music and intense, heartbreaking, dangerous beauty - and that I had to find the words to fit that mood.

However, I am clear now that this has to change. I have a number of longer stories of which only one (A Crime to Outlive Him) has been anything like finished; and re-reading it recently, I found that, while I still like the welter of ideas I put there, the prose is among the worst I ever wrote, screaming to be rewritten. Whether bad style, with every bad feature of the worst of my writing, is directly to do with the strain of writing out a long story (which took me over a year to finish) with no outline, I don't know, but I think it might be. I have a suspicion that as I was writing this, I was finding it so hard to get to the next chapter that I just left anything I wrote lying there as I forced myself on. So I have to start outlining, even if I forget the outline afterwards. It is as necessary as the trellis for a climbing plant. But that is just me, and other writers will say differently.

I tend to be a meticulous outliner, to my own detriment.

Because I not only outline the events of my stories, I arrangement into timelines and calendars, and sometimes into daily schedules. I have a nearly obsessive need to know exactly when everything happens in relation to everything else, and to know exactly where all of my characters are in relation to one another whether I'm writing them at the time or not.

Unfortunately, that can result in me spending more time working on my outline(/timeline/calendar/schedule) than on the writing of the story itself. That's part of what's got The Thief of Souls stalled at the moment. I've created so much story for the story that it can feel nearly overwhelming if I look at too much at once.

I know the next few major events, including an international dueling competition in Brussels, a kidnapping, and an incident at St. Mungo's. Before any of that happens, though, a few more elements have to appear in the next chapter to lay the groundwork for plot developments that occur after those events.

And I know the big generalities, like who the villain is and what that person's motivations are and who specifically is going to die (though someone else was originally the victim; in the course of outlining, however, I discovered that it'd be more logical to make it this person).

But how I'm going to get there is as much a mystery to me right now as it is to the reader.

So: yeah. I'm an outliner. That being said, I've also discovered that however much I outline, my final story will end up roughly three times longer than I planned. Because, I've discovered, no matter how much I plan, I always wind up having those organic ideas in the process of writing. And I always wind up following them and adding about three times as much material as I had envisioned.

You might think I would therefore learn to limit the amount of actual plot in my stories, but of course that's never the case.

I outline. Then I write. Sometimes the two bear a passing resemblance to each other. Usually.... no. If things go well and the characters come to life then they tend to disagree with my outline and insist on going their own way.

At the moment I am stuck trying to write the first chapter of an original fiction. I have an outline (I have several outlines). I know what the book is "about" and who the people in it are. I just can't seem to write the first chapter.

*sigh*

Never Believe Your Lying Outline

Outlining

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Outlining

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