Considerations from My First Novel, Part 3: Revising My Outline Like a Lunatic
Honestly, I don’t even recall what I told my girlfriend to make her draw this, and I have no clue what this is supposed to represent in relation to this article. Something about. . . the power of words?
Yeah, let’s go with that. Sure.¹
I. Introduction, or, Why This Has All Been Such a Harrowing Venture
Setting up this article was a pain, not because I don’t like writing, and believe me when I say that it has nothing to do with you. It’s not like that. The issue is that I don’t know how to structure one.
If you have one single point you want to make, it’s fairly simple. Set up the overarching problem, innumerate the hindrances that stymied your success, and finally explain how you resolved them. That’s simple, but what if you want to say a lot more? What if it’s not as simple as one single piece of information that you want to convey? What if you want to both recount and teach? How do you get all of these ideas down into one single coherent and cohesive essay?
Not to mention, I have a cluttered mind, disorganized and full of thoughts that are never resolved. I hear that some maniacs can sit and think about something, “organize their thoughts,” and then write. People who can do that are likely also combating the daily urge to murder their neighbors’ pets, I’d imagine.
For people like myself—sane people, I mean—who have cluttered, clamorous thoughts at all times, the trick is not, as some people believe, to allow your surroundings to be cluttered, as though the clutter is somehow beneficial or some kind of feature of a passionate individual who has no time for petty things like erecting his toppled energy drink cans; but the solution is rather to be more organized. It may sound oxymoronic—or perhaps it sounds obvious—to suggest that an unorganized person should “just be organized,” like telling a depressive to just cheer up already and stop harshing everyone’s mellow, but our kind, clutter-minded people like us, we don’t have the benefit of an organized disposition, so we must enforce organization upon ourselves via external means.
What I’m saying is that there is nothing intuitive for me about writing, fiction or essays alike.
Of course, I know, one of the biggest fallacies in the public perception is the idea that we creative types are, well, a “type” at all, somehow inherently capable of performing striking displays of wit on the strength of some mystical talent. The truth, fortunately or unfortunately, is that almost everything is a skill, with learnable techniques that must be practiced and developed with diligence. The reason I mention this is because when I first started writing I avoided outlining, then when I started outlining I avoided learning how to do it right, and now that I’m learning to outline through trial and error, I’m beginning to write essays that I also don’t know how to write and that I’m also refusing to research, as though “figuring it out” is any less frustrating than writing dud after dud in a bullheaded avoidance of having to look for help. Despite my own personal experience with story-writing and outlining, experience that tells me in certain terms that trying to do it all without learning from those with more experience than me is a tedious, demoralizing route, I insist, subconsciously perhaps, in continuing to use that same inefficient path, seeming to never learn from it. . . or, well, I learn, right? I just don’t heed my own wisdom.
I think my problem is that I don’t like being patronized. I know enough that I don’t need to be spoon-fed, but you can’t always find advice directly tailored to your specific skill level. I know that, but I’m stupidly stubborn, so there!
All of this is to say that writing my story outline for what is likely going to be a trilogy has been a painful, tedious and emotional process, and now you know why. So let’s dig into the specifics. Maybe you’ll learn something by accident and not need to feel condescended to in the process.
II. What I Actually Did in My Outline
This is a difficult question to answer, not because I don’t know the answer but because it’s not particularly interesting. That is to say, I can give you a list, but would you actually read it? or even skim it? Sure, it’s interesting to me, but I’m the bloody author. Everything I write is interesting to me, and that’s not because everything I write is interesting to me, but because I’m interested in what any given piece I wrote says about me.
I don’t generally read or write horror, but if I ever did, I’d look back on that writing with fascination. “Wow, I can write horror, too? What a creative individual I am!” I’d say, impressed that I was able to write a horror story so intriguing and fun. Naturally, it’s not actually intriguing and fun, not to anyone else anyway, just me. Because I wrote it. I think this is a feeling with which most people who indulge in an art-form of some sort are familiar: Drawings you keep looking back on even though you know they’re not nearly as good as that artist you admire; that hilarious Youtube video you made that you keep re-watching; that fan-fiction that no one cares about but that you can reread once a year and find entertaining. I’m not actually completely certain what it is about our own mediocre output that we find fascinating, but it seems evident that it’s there.
Too bad everyone else is impervious to those feelings that we have for our works. To them, your novice scribblings are like a novice’s scribblings.
So let me try to express everything I did in a way that is at least mildly compelling. (I have, at the time of this writing, no clue how I’m going to do that. This is 100% false confidence I’m exuding here, but I bet you were thinking, “He’s so rugged and confident, how does he do it? In what brilliant fashion is he going to show us his writing process? How is he going to make such an agonizingly dull topic the slightest bit interesting to anyone but himself?” Let’s find out together—or not, as the case may be.)
III. Cause and Effect
After some deliberation and internet searching, I’ve decided to try a cause-and-effect style of article. I’m going to tell you what I did and what effect that had, both on the writing and on me. Honestly, I have a small pond’s worth of ideas swimming around in my head, but if I’m going to have any kind of readable essay I’m gonna need to keep this focused on the key points, which means that you, the reader, can anticipate a concise and brief read.
Let’s see how well this paragraph ages.
IV. Outlining
The Method:
Why don’t we begin with the big picture? After all, that’s how it started, with my outlining process.
The plan was simple: Outline the story quickly, and messily if necessary. Then I’d go back and outline the story again, this time with the depth of understanding that I lacked on the first outline. With my new knowledge on the story, insight into the characters, and familiarity with the locations—this is an entire world I created from scratch—I could flesh everything out, set events rolling easily into subsequent events, backed by powerful character motivations and leading cleverly to a satisfying resolution not only for the story itself, but for each individual character’s meticulously crafted personal arc.
Well, I did write the first rough draft, and I then wrote a detailed outline. I then did a heavy revision on that outline. As I did this, I kept a running tally of every idea I had that I wanted to see in the story. When I finished the revision, I went through the whole thing and added in as many of those as I could, of which there were over forty. Furthermore, as I wrote the second outline, I would bold anything that needed more details so that I needn’t stop writing to come up with ideas right away, and could finish the overarching plot. I had to go back again and flesh out all of those sections, of which there were dozens at least, if not less.
Finally, I reached the stage at which I presently exist, where I’m reading back through the outline just to ensure everything makes sense. I’ll work out continuity errors, poor character motivations and logistical errors if any remain, although I worked out most of those during the Detailed Outline Revision phase discussed above.
The Result:
The result is a story that took around two years, collectively, just to finish the outline. To be fair, although the outlining method may be inefficient and I had to learn as I went, and I discovered better methods here and there along the way, it’s not entirely the fault of my outlining process. There were many detours along the way. I had to practice, sometimes I felt the need to write creatively and I’d do a short story or other creative piece, and sometimes I had to write articles for this site, which, with so many dedicated readers, absolutely could not be sidelined.
What Did We Learn:
When you sit down to write a story, you better know what you want before you start anything, even the outline, lest you flounder like I did. My story was initially going to be a “Home Alone in a fantasy-sci-fi world” story, a description that’s not all that accurate but close enough for the elevator pitch. It ended up being a sprawling fantasy adventure.
Why?
Well, first of all, I started with world-building. This wasn’t completely a bad thing because it gave me a lot of details starting out that I could easily build story ideas around, but it hindered in ways far worse. What was supposed to be a small, 150-page story ended up being what is likely three books’ worth of story because when I finished outlining the initial concept, I realized I had about an hundred miles of detailed lore that had no relevance to the plot I was writing.
That started my problems, but there was an even worse issue: I didn’t know what the point of my story was. I had a main character finding a piece of ancient, powerful tech, and I knew the government wanted the tech, but I didn’t know how far the government would go to get it, or what the main character would have to do to defend himself. I also have a penchant for making every bad guy either 1) not that bad, or 2) turn good, so this was not the kind of story where the bad guy is evil and persistent and the whole plot is driven by his maniacal tenacity that can only be ended with the kind of finality that requires a preacher to properly resolve with an impassioned denouement.
I had written three-quarters of the story before I had a particularly good idea of what the point of the story was, of what drove the main character to do what he was doing, of how it is that he came to be involved in all of this stuff, and why it is he persisted when things were clearly dangerous.
There was another problem with this. I kept adding onto the story to make it longer, but my additions were not particularly thoughtful. “What if this happened?”
That’s not always a bad thing, but up to this point I didn’t even know what the ending was, and I realized at some point that I was casting about, searching for a direction because I didn’t know where the story was supposed to be going.
It’s a wonder I ever made it to the end of this confused monster.
V. Refining
The Method:
Apart from the actual outlining itself, y’know, the plot and all, I spent a lot of time refining things. Everything, really.
During the revision of the rough draft stage, I created a dozen or more new characters, a dozen or so new villages and cities with names, topography and at least a little cultural detail; I created new animals, new technologies, new research facilities and, for most of these laboratories, I had to create espionage sequences in which the main character infiltrated the edifices in various ways, which took some research and creativity to plan out.
The Result:
The result is that it took a lot of time. I mentioned this before, and it’s something I admit that I keep fretting about, but if the result is an excellent, entertaining story, then I guess it’ll have been worth it.
Besides time, it took a lot of emotional and creative energy. I spent many hours, collectively, pacing to and fro, trying to think of how to resolve complex logistical issues. One piece of technology went through a half-dozen revisions, its final form resembling in no way its original form. It all seems distant now, but the almost manic anxiety, to the point nearly of desperation, was neither fun, or easy to endure. It is my hope and intention to do a far better job of laying the ground-work on subsequent stories to avoid exactly this.
And, of course, to write more effective stories, and to write them more timely. In my defense, if this whole ordeal results in a three-book series, then it was probably worth it. Maybe. I guess. I don’t know what I’m doing.
What We Learned:
Know what you want early, and if you don’t know what you want, figure it out. I had too many characters that didn’t have strong enough motivations. I had too many locations that I didn’t need, while locations I did need had to be newly invented, taking up twice the amount of energy—not to mention time—as they would have otherwise.
More than once I had characters all meeting up, coincidentally or otherwise, at one location, only for me to decide that one of the characters needs to take a detour first, thereby throwing off the timeline. When I did this, I had to decide if the other characters would get held up, if they would also take detours, or if they would arrive at the location and remain there long enough for the other characters to arrive so that the story could proceed as normal. Contriving story events like this can be frustrating because you’re painfully aware of just how contrived it is, even if that contrivance (and with this parenthetical addendum, that’s every form of the word contrive in a single sentence) will not be apparent to the reader in the final draft.
Some things can’t be helped, of course. You can’t know everything you’ll need right away, but there are key elements you can weave into the fabric of the plot early on to avoid expending loads of energy on things that either won’t be used in your story, or will need to be added to the story through major alterations that take up more time and energy unnecessarily. For instance: Why a character is even doing what he’s doing. Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable concept to establish early on. Geez.
Not to mention I now have an entire character that might be cut because that section of the story just isn’t big enough to justify developing her. I’m still tossing the idea around, because I really like the idea, but there might just not be enough room for her. We’ll see. (Her name is Tawny Kinney, incidentally, so if you read this, and then read the book in a couple years, you’ll know who I’m talking about. This hypothetical is super likely.)
VI. Proceeding from There
So what do I intend to do now?
Well, I’m reading back over the story one more time to ensure everything’s good to go. I’m also partitioning it into chapters and scenes to facilitate giving each sequence a direction, which is something that I’ve learned throughout this whole process. It requires a lot of artifice to write something that reads naturally, a truth that I rejected for a long time because I hated the idea of following formulae and rules. That takes all the fun out of it!
Now of course I realize that a story itself is artificial. You can tell a 100% truthful story, but it will still be filled with artificial—or embellished—tension. . . if you’re good at telling stories.
Once I’m finished with that I’ll finally, finally write the prose, which is going to be a struggle in and of itself.
But that’s beyond the scope of this article.
I’m glad to be done with the outline, but I’m still way too anxious about everything that follows to pop any celebratory champagne. Ultimately, I’m still going to be working on it just as hard as ever. It’s tough, but even if the story doesn’t sell, even if it sucks, I can still say I did it, and I certainly learned something from the whole process.
It’s something to be proud of, if not precisely celebrated, and I reckon I’d drink to that.
¹ Note from my girlfriend: “It represents getting the words from your head to the page.”
Alright, yeah, that makes more sense than what I said. I’m glad I thought of it.
