Plot Synopses

I should be going off to do errands right now. And I will, really. Promise! But I was just checking my blog (trying to find out when I went to the Dan Wells book signing, to find out if it was before or after last Christmas, which in turn would tell me if I can buy a Dan Wells book as a present for one of my nephews this year or if I already did it last year) — and I was struck by the impulse to write a quick post.

(Note: It's now more than 2 weeks later. Obviously, I didn't, in fact, get any further at that time. But I will take up the task now, and hope to actually produce something…)

For much of this past year, I've been attempting (between being a dad, doing my paid writing, political involvement and other projects, and sheer laziness) to work on my empath novel. Somewhere I've got more than a half-dozen drafts of my first chapter alone — some radically different from others, in matters ranging from point of view (first versus third person) to location (Nebraska to Kansas to the Twin Cities) to the sudden unexpected appearance of a mysterious villain in one draft (since excised). About the only constants have been (a) that my character is a teenage boy who is also an empath, (b) that the story begins the day he starts high school, and (c) that his best friend is Iranian-American.

Part of what's had me stalled has been figuring out Cameron's character and how I want to tell the story. A big part, though, has been simply being unsure about where to go next. And so back in November, I think, I decided to try writing an outline, or more precisely a synopsis. (Exactly what makes a synopsis different from an outline is fuzzy in my brain, except that I think of an outline as being more structured and a synopsis as being more loosey-goosey, as well as being written in paragraph form.) And so I did that thing. Then I decided that in order to make sense of what was going on in this novel, I had to add some notes about my intentions for the two novels that will follow it as well. A couple of week later, I had 8 pages of single-spaced text giving a basic overview of 3 novels.

The process was illuminating. I've been leery about outlining my stories, ever since the time a few years ago when I discovered I was following my outline too slavishly and that the story I was writing had ceased to have much life to it. I managed to write No Going Back without ever creating an outline, although I did have a detailed timeline where I kept track of what happened when. It also occurred to me, however — in thinking about my challenges with this empath story — that I had a much clearer mental picture of the main story arc and contributing storylines of No Going Back prior to writing it — and that I spent a fair amount of time mentally working out those storylines as needed during the process of writing. I certainly wasn't simply discovering the plot as I went along.

And so I decided to give outlining — er, synopsizing — a second chance. And to my pleased surprise, I found that the process wasn't simply a mechanical one of recording decisions already made, but stimulated me to think about my story in new ways that made it better and, I think, a lot more solid. At least in potential. Things jumped out at me that I hadn't considered before. New possibilities came to the fore, and previously unmade plot decisions became more clear. Well, some of them. Others remained muddy, or even stirred up new sand and much and flotsam. But then, that's the creative process, isn't it? I don't think I'd trust the results if everything seemed too neat and tidy at this point in the process.

*****

I haven't had a chance to do much writing from my synopsis yet, so I don't know how it will actually work. And I'm sure that many of the things in that synopsis will change during the process of writing, and yet again in the process(es) of revision. But it gives me a place to start. I can't help feeling encouraged — and that I'm now further down the road toward getting this novel actually written.