Con Shirt Outline Update
Aug. 26th, 2007 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marfiskI did something on this outline that I've never done on this scale before and it's killing me. I had an interesting discussion with a friend who was trying to use me as an example of how to outline. She made me come to the conclusion that I'm a fake, a fraud, not really a logical thinker at all :). Okay, this is a kind of crosswise concept, but when have I ever done anything in a straightforward manner. I've been planning to discuss this bit of my process for some time but never got around to it. So here we go.
I am an outliner. I like them because they enable me to work on nuance (yep, that word again) when I'm writing rather than figuring out the overall plot stuff. They also allow me to encapsulate an idea in a format that I can use at the drop of a hat if, for example, I get this crazy idea that I won't do the National Novel Month challenge until, say, a week before day one (Demon Rules came about this way).
So my friend asks me for some good examples, which turned out not to fit her criteria at all. She's asking me where I track the emotional evolution of the character, the character and plot arcs, etc. Me? I'm just telling a story. All that is an integrated part of the story, so it'll be there when I need it.
She declared me an evolved organic.
I've thought for quite some time that my outlines, clocking in between 10k and 20k are actually more like an organic's first draft split along POV lines than what is traditionally considered a writing outline. When pressed, I came up with this grand description: my scene blurbs contain whatever's necessary to draw me back into the scene I saw in my head when I wrote the outline. They have bits of character emotion, scenery, scents, frustrations, physical movement, objects that need to have a place... What they don't have is a classification of any of the traditional elements. They don't point out character arcs, they don't express plot points, though they may reference them if, for example, this scene has the character realize the truth about something 20 scenes ago. They're pure narrative, more like mini synopses than anything analytical. But the trick is that they work for me. Go back to the top where I said what I wanted out of my outlines. They give me the freedom to absorb myself in the story while secure in the knowledge that it knows where to go and where to end up.
Which brings me back to what I've spent over 3 hours working on and am now going to quit for the night.
Armed with the above realization, scene order didn't seem as essential. I know how to reorder scenes. I'm actually teaching a class with that as one of the elements in the Muse Online Conference in October. I've recommended scene reordering to increase tension and had to undergo that horrible exercise in my own works as well. But it's always been with the bulk of something in a fixed state. Let me tell you that writing scenes out of order in my initial outline is insane! Each time I think I've reordered something correctly, I realize that f) can't happen before b) and I have to start again. This whole process is complicated by the fact that I have two plot threads that interact without ever touching. Something happening in the MC's thread sets off something in the villain's thread so those must occur in order at the same time as several things must happen in the main thread's subthreads that are not directly related but which build on each other.
To be honest, I'm confident in the placement of the first 3-4 scenes and the last 3-4 scenes. Pretty much the rest of the 44 scenes are up in the air and must be nailed down before Labor of Love starts on the 31st. My head aches already :p.
Oh, and the current estimate for length is 66,000. That's actually not too bad as the market average is around 90k or so and I will probably add more when writing and then again when editing. It's odd for me to have such a short novel though.
I am an outliner. I like them because they enable me to work on nuance (yep, that word again) when I'm writing rather than figuring out the overall plot stuff. They also allow me to encapsulate an idea in a format that I can use at the drop of a hat if, for example, I get this crazy idea that I won't do the National Novel Month challenge until, say, a week before day one (Demon Rules came about this way).
So my friend asks me for some good examples, which turned out not to fit her criteria at all. She's asking me where I track the emotional evolution of the character, the character and plot arcs, etc. Me? I'm just telling a story. All that is an integrated part of the story, so it'll be there when I need it.
She declared me an evolved organic.
I've thought for quite some time that my outlines, clocking in between 10k and 20k are actually more like an organic's first draft split along POV lines than what is traditionally considered a writing outline. When pressed, I came up with this grand description: my scene blurbs contain whatever's necessary to draw me back into the scene I saw in my head when I wrote the outline. They have bits of character emotion, scenery, scents, frustrations, physical movement, objects that need to have a place... What they don't have is a classification of any of the traditional elements. They don't point out character arcs, they don't express plot points, though they may reference them if, for example, this scene has the character realize the truth about something 20 scenes ago. They're pure narrative, more like mini synopses than anything analytical. But the trick is that they work for me. Go back to the top where I said what I wanted out of my outlines. They give me the freedom to absorb myself in the story while secure in the knowledge that it knows where to go and where to end up.
Which brings me back to what I've spent over 3 hours working on and am now going to quit for the night.
Armed with the above realization, scene order didn't seem as essential. I know how to reorder scenes. I'm actually teaching a class with that as one of the elements in the Muse Online Conference in October. I've recommended scene reordering to increase tension and had to undergo that horrible exercise in my own works as well. But it's always been with the bulk of something in a fixed state. Let me tell you that writing scenes out of order in my initial outline is insane! Each time I think I've reordered something correctly, I realize that f) can't happen before b) and I have to start again. This whole process is complicated by the fact that I have two plot threads that interact without ever touching. Something happening in the MC's thread sets off something in the villain's thread so those must occur in order at the same time as several things must happen in the main thread's subthreads that are not directly related but which build on each other.
To be honest, I'm confident in the placement of the first 3-4 scenes and the last 3-4 scenes. Pretty much the rest of the 44 scenes are up in the air and must be nailed down before Labor of Love starts on the 31st. My head aches already :p.
Oh, and the current estimate for length is 66,000. That's actually not too bad as the market average is around 90k or so and I will probably add more when writing and then again when editing. It's odd for me to have such a short novel though.
