Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Old Nut Can Trick

The Old Nut Can Trick…

Remember the Gag they used to sell at the novelty store…? The nut can trick…? How it would scare the heck out of an unsuspecting person? Well you don’t want to do that as an author with your reader. Outlines are the way you keep the story in the can. You might be smart as Buford Finsterwald but for anyone, regardless of how gifted, complexity willl eventually require an outline.

Outlines are obviously a useful device for setting the structure of the story line and getting the scenes in each chapter into some sort of orderly flow….as the complexity of the story grows they become increasingly important to the continuity of the structure. There is however another important purpose.

Once you have the chapters and scenes sorted out then you need to decide how the moments in the scene are going to go together. If how this is going to happen is not crystal clear when you begin writing a chapter it is going to be difficult to get into the writing. (Garbage in garbage out) Thus another mini outline is very useful….You break each chapter into scenes and each scene into moments.

You begin by saying…OK what is going to happen in this scene….For example I am now working on Chapter 4 Revised, Habit of Despair… In this chapter there are 5 scenes. The first is where Maria and Teresa get together and Maria tries to tell her friend that Ricardo is really sorry about what happened in the garden. In the Second I have to introduce Benvolio. After all he is one of the two main characters and it is already overdue…maybe too long overdue. In the third I need for Ricardo, when he finds out Teresa is going to the Convent, to try and plead his case in person as a last resort….Here he's rebuked in front of everyone. In the forth I need to show a meeting of church leaders with Ferdinand and Isabella and give the readers a sense for what is going down on the religious front….here I want to show a crack in united front of the Monarchs that Torquemada decides to exploit. In the fifth Maria and Ricardo have dinner with the Monarchs who are aware of the argument….Here it will be shown that Teresa can’t take her vows without the Monarchs say so…and Ricardo is sent off to negotiate a treaty with the Basques.

Now look at the first Scene and forget about everything else...Here Maria is determined to plead her brother's case... What does she do? Well she goes to Teresa's house and her young friend just happens to be home....there she discovers the poor girl is so dissillusioned with her boyfriend that she has decided to join the Convent....Try as she will Maria can't get Teresa to change her mind...In the process she finds out the coach to the convent leaves at 3 O'clock....Teresa tells her friend politely she is busy and to get lost....Maria tells her brother about the mission failure and that the coach to the Convent leaves at 3 O'clock...This should give you a sense for the seconds ticking away in this moment....I won't bore you with a dissection of the other four.

Now this chapter has a lot working and without breaking the chapter into scenes and the scenes into moments it would be a daunting task, however; no moment in itself is all that overwhelming and taking the chapter in little bites will make it manageable.

In the second edit the beginning has been radically changed and it has been a challenge to expand it without having it explode out of the can like those gag springs used to do…you remember the springs in a sleeve of cloth…stuffed into the can with the lid then secured…That an unsuspecting person would open and darn near suffer a coronary…YOU DON"T?…shucks! I must be dating myself. Anyway in my second edit, it has been challenging to get the spring sleeves (Chapters, Scene and moments) back into the can. Without an outline it would have been impossible.