Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Outline?

Today I want to talk about this important aspect of the process. I get comments all the time that writing from an outline is all but impossible for most writers. This is because they try and use an outline to accomplish the impossible.

Trying to come up with a story line using an outline as starting point is about as futile and frustrating as it gets. Note that in writing the comprehensive outline for the Petra story, the first step was “Exploratory Writing.“ At WDC this is made easy with all the contests. You simply take that amorphous germ of an idea and write a vignette about it using one of the contests. I suggest a contest that has a 3K word ceiling. Flash fiction, which I will define here as 1K or less really sharpens your skills but what you are shooting for is the meat of about a chapter that can be expanded later on. Further a contest that runs every week is superior to one that runs monthly for this purpose.

So you enter this “short story” and get some feedback….usually there is at least the “Obligatory Review” provided by the host/hostess of the contest, (they like repeat entries) and you have a beginning. The next week there is a new prompt and you are ready for your next vignette. This is also a good place to do a little character development. There are two popular approaches to doing this….The first is to use a “Trait Profile” and the second is to do a “Sketch.” As new characters begin to evolve use one or the other of these back-story type techniques to sharpen your character's focus. These profiles/sketches are like a back-story is to a novel. You will use some of it in the actual writing but most will remain submerged. While the audience/reader won’t see it all the writer needs to get to know the characters on a much more intimate basis and as the picture expands the profile/sketch should be expanded and like the back-story become a living document.

Under the umbrella of the overarching story that begins to spin as you enter these contests from week to week, the thread begins to percolate up. For most minds it is difficult to outline a story that doesn’t exist yet and regurgitating a ten K story line from a 1K brain can be overwhelming. So you let the story bubble up in little chunks while you have fun doing the contests. When you have say ten vignettes written then stop….At this point you have the story line and from there you can write the tread of an outline and include in it the dramatic ingredients as I demonstrated yesterday in the one I provided on Petra’s story.

Let me say here since I still have some room left, that once you have the Comprehensive outline, writing the Novella becomes much more doable. You know your story as a beginning middle and end and if you write one chunk at a time you will soon come to “The End” and have an integrated manuscript that contains all the traditional story telling ingredients.

The writer isn’t close to finished at this point but is better postured than if the manuscript was in the final polish phase where it tends to become rigid and resistant to anything more than final tweaking. The Manuscript in the Comprehensive Outline Phase is totally pliable and expandable. Chapters can be added that move the story along, more exposition added, and all that other work that will expand the word count into a least twice it was in the vignettes.

In the military, a guy in Napoleon’s time, named Clausewitz, was a thinker who came up with many innovations in the development of the German General Staff . One of these was The Three Levels of War. These are the Tactical, the Operational and the Strategic. In writing a novel the outline is analogous to the strategic, the Operational… to the Comprehensive Outline and the tactical to writing each chapter. Trying to juggle all three at the same time simply doesn’t work… not in war or in working a novel. The science of storytelling requires making each a separate component and then working each part as a manageable subset of the whole.