Our process, part 2: Outlining
Sorry for the delay, everyone! I had intended to get to this post earlier, but it’s been a long week. Friends in the hospital, an RPG campaign to finish this weekend and a funeral to fly down to at 4 am the next day. I’m already tired.
But I finished the re-write pass on Lily Quinn #9 (which doesn’t have a page yet and is titled A Made Man) and have a little time to blog. We’ll get to the part where I explain the re-write pass in a couple of posts, when I talk about manuscripting.
(If you haven’t read the first part of this series, it was about concepts/ideas. It’s not required reading or anything, but it might be helpful.)
This post is all about outlining! If you’re already a writer, then you’re probably heard talk of pantsers versus plotters, or outlining versus discovery writing. Both of these come down to the same thing: do you like to plan your book out ahead of time or figure it out on the fly (or by the seat of your pants, as the first name implies)?
This post will be of absolutely no use to you if you’re a pantser. I pantsed my first two books, but have since then become a very firm plotter. It’s considerably less romantic, but I’m a lot happier.
Okay, I wrote a whole story here about how I fucked up In the House of Five Dragons and how that led me into becoming a plotter. Then I deleted it because that’s really not what matters here. The long and short of it was that I had to throw away months of work because I didn’t know where my story was going and became determined never to waste that much effort ever again. If we ever meet in person, ask and I’ll tell you the whole crappy story, including about how much I cried.
Spoiler: It was a lot.
So now we outline! It took a lot of iterations before Aron and I nailed down our process, but now it pretty much looks the same for every book – three outlines in increasing levels of complexity.
We’ll use an example concept: An evil alien sandwich wants to take over the world.
Level 1 outline
Once we have the concept, Aron and I sit down (usually over a dinner at our favorite restaurant, but this part is optional) to figure out the most basic events of our story. This outline takes one session of work and ends up with between three and ten bullet points.
– Sandwich arrives on Earth. (Method? Are we talking ship or teleport? Both?)
– Sandwich is picked up by human. Human attempts to eat it. (What do was want to do with this human? Real enemy or do they make up in the end?)
– Sandwich is furious. Decides that all humans are horrible monsters and that Earth must be conquered for the safety of all sandwiches.
– Develops evil plan. (Involving bologna? Maybe in ironic turn, requires other foodstuffs to carry out plan.)
– Carries out evil plan. Is thwarted by the love of humans for all things sandwich-y. (Do we use original human here? Maybe union of humanity and sandwich?)
– Epilogue showing happy lunchtime future.
Pretty bare bones, as you can see. But it needs to be at this stage. It’s easy to get bogged down in the details and lose track of the big picture, which is what we need at this point. We don’t want to lose any of those little questions and sparks, so we write them down for later consideration, as in the parentheses above.
Aron: Actually at this point can we add a step where I throw something at you for suggesting a sandwich story? An evil alien sandwich?
That’s usually it for the first session of outlining. We let it sit in our brains for a few days while we work on other things. When we come back, we make sure that’s still what we want to happen. If not, we revise and repeat. If it is good to go, we move on to the level 2 outline.
Level 2 outline
We used to call these ‘orbital level’, ‘map level’ and ‘detailed outline’, but eventually just started using numbers. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was easier. It’s certainly more streamlined than the original names.
The level 2 outline takes a lot more time than the first one, but this one Aron and I still develop together. This will be a week or more of dinners and tapping notes like crazy into my phone, then expanding on them once I get back to my computer.
While level 1 is about what happens, level 2 is about why and how. We already know what we need to happen. Now we need to make the progression make sense and feel natural.
– Sandwich arrives on Earth.
– – Arrives by bologna beam. Always leaves a distinctive smell in its wake.
– – Lands in a park. Easy place to be noticed and picked up by a human.
– Sandwich is picked up by human. Human attempts to eat it.
– – Human in this case is a child. This will make it pretty obvious that the enmity isn’t deadly. They’ll ally in the end.
– – Kid is just hungry. A bully took his/her lunch and they’re glad for something to eat.
– – One bite is taken before the sandwich slithers away.
– Sandwich is furious. Decides that all humans are horrible monsters and that Earth must be conquered for the safety of all sandwiches.
– – Alien sandwich takes refuge in refuse, garbage can. Good place for thoughts of gloom and doom.
– Develops evil plan.
– – I’m thinking that our sandwich will take inspiration from the trash he’s in.
– – Trash cannon? Aliens all have telekinesis, right? How about a TK trash launch?
– Carries out evil plan. Is thwarted by the love of humans for all things sandwich-y.
– – Sandwich TKs himself and trash up, launches at the kid.
– – But kid is involved in altercation with bully again.
– – Sandwich slats into bully’s face.
– – Sandwich is the hero for getting the bully and celebrated by kid. Ever seen a kid hug a sandwich?
– Epilogue showing happy lunchtime future.
– – Sandwich goes home with kid. Is carried to school every day without going moldy. It is, after all, an alien sandwich.
– – Weird, but there you go.
That’s level 2! We have details of how things are going to happen any why.
Aron: I have now been won over by the sandwich story. The bologna beam was my idea. What Erica isn’t showing are all the failed attempts. Sometimes we’ll get this far and end up stuck on a bullet point, banging our heads against it for a week before we get lucky and come up with something that makes sense, or we admit that we must have done something wrong and we spool it back to the last part where it worked.
Erica: That’s a fair point. When coming up with the “trash cannon” idea, I went through three or four different iterations, some of which involved raising an army of discarded food items, but that logically didn’t work, since our sandwich is only sentient because it’s alien. I considered some kind of alien-food mind-transfer, but that raised questions that felt like they distracted from the main story. It took a couple of tries before I settled on the misfired trash cannon.
Level 3 outline
Okay, that level 2 outline got kind of long. If I do a full level 3, we’re going to be here all day.
While Aron and I work level 1 and 2 outlines together, I typically do the level 3 outline on my own. It takes so long that we can’t really manage it over dinners with cell phone notes. For the final outline, I need a laptop, a soda and up to a couple weeks of work. By the time I give it to Aron, the outline might be ten thousand words long.
This final outline includes every detail that I can think of ahead of time that I want Aron to include in the manuscript. For example:
– Sandwich arrives on Earth.
– – Arrives by bologna beam. Always leaves a distinctive smell in its wake.
– – – Cooked meat. Like cooked bologna, specifically. Not that the sandwich thinks of it this way. But if you can evoke the feel of bologna, great.
– – Lands in a park. Easy place to be noticed and picked up by a human.
– – – Probably because I’ve been working on a lot of Lily Quinn, I’m thinking of Gates Park. Grassy, open.
– – – But this is a place where kids are going to be hanging out. Preferably lots of kids for the ending in which the bully will be brought low.
– – – Playground. Brightly colored and well-maintained even this close to the coast. This is a light story and run-down playgrounds are for horror stories.
– – – Bright weather, clear skies. Makes it easy for the alien sandwich to land and also sets a bright tone for the story.
– – – Coastal plants, grass and ice plant. Sandy ground and redwood trees. Seagulls, too, especially where the trash can is concerned.
– Sandwich is picked up by human. Human attempts to eat it.
– – Human in this case is a child. This will make it pretty obvious that the enmity isn’t deadly. They’ll ally in the end.
– – – I’m thinking not much in the way of a standard physical description of kid here. What the hell does a sandwich care about the nuance of skin, hair and eye color? To him, the strangeness is limbs, lack of bread and even having a head.
– – – Describe child in terms that feel as alien as possible, while still describing an obviously human child.
– – – Liken clothes to bread, the outer covering. Bread is the space suit for our alien? What do you think, Aron?
For a book, there are pages and pages of this. While he’s writing up the manuscript, Aron’s welcome to discard any of my ideas. He might come back to me later, saying that it just felt different at the time or the idea as presented in my outline didn’t work on the page. How can he describe a child in alien terms but still make it clear we’re looking at a human child?
That’s fine. The outline is just a framework. It tells us where we plan to go and gives an idea how to get there. If something else better occurs to us along the way, that’s great! We don’t throw ideas out just because they’re not in the outline, but that outlines gives us something to work those ideas into. The outline isn’t meant as a rail we can never deviate from, but a map to make sure we’re never lost.
Aron: For me, I need momentum. If I have a vision of how the scene is going to play out, I chug along pretty quickly. I’m not the fastest writer ever, but I did 50k words in two days. That’s NaNoWriMo in two days, which isn’t bad. But if I have to stop and think of what needs to come next, I start slowing down. That’s what this level 3 outline gives me – a checklist of important bits I need to cover and as many details as Erica can give me so I don’t have to stop to think.
Erica is very nice, she lets me leave little editing tags for things I want her to look at in more detail. I will be writing away about this sandwich and come to discussing the condiments and just drop in >>put fancy mustard here, because I can’t be bothered to stop and research mustards. I just write and don’t look back, not until Erica’s had her way with the rough manuscript and I review her work. Yeah, sometimes I end up just writing along and drift off the outline, but that’s where we let some discovery happen. As long as all the important things happened and we have a path to the next important bit, we’re good.
Erica: Well, I was going to go into this more in the manuscripting post, but… yeah. I spend a lot of time filling in gaps in the first draft.
And now that we have the completed map, it’s time to write the manuscript! The next post in this series will be about the process.
