Cardboard Characters on an Empty Stage
There are some authors who love to outline their novels in great detail before putting pen to paper, (or fingertips to computer keyboard), whilst others prefer to start writing from a simple idea, a situation, and see where it goes.
Suspense novelist Richard S Prather outlined his novels in great detail.
I spend considerable time on plot development, typing roughly 100,000 words or more of scene fragments, gimmicks, “what if?” possibilities, alternative actions or solutions, until the overall story line satisfies me. I boil all of this down to a couple of pages, then from these prepare a detailed chapter-by-chapter synopsis, using a separate page (or more) for each of, say, twenty chapters, and expanding in those pages on characters, motivations, scenes, action, whenever such expansion seems a natural development. When the synopsis is done, I start the first draft of the book, and bang away as speedily as possible until the end.
Lawrence Block – Writing the Novel
Randy Ingermanson uses a concept he calls the Snowflake Method, to build up a detailed outline for a novel from a simple, one line concept.
Stephen King, on the other hand, prefers starting out with a situation, and begins writing immediately.
I want to tell you about my experiences.
I prefer writing to outlining. Outlining has its place, I’m sure, but writing is what I enjoy doing, and where I feel I am at my most productive and honest. I’ve tried outlining, and I even tried the Snowflake Method once. I finished up with a detailed outline, complete with character biographies, the plot broken down into scenes and chapters, side notes detailing whose point of view the scene was from, and internal and external conflicts. But I never wrote a single word of the story. What I had started out believing was going to be an exciting, action packed novel of tension and surprise, had become drab and boring and completely mechanical, devoid of any joy or life.
Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that one way is right and the other is wrong. I’ll leave that to the fundamentalist teachers.
But come with me for a moment, I want to show you something.
Joe Coffin looked at the tower block through the rain spotted windscreen. The car’s suspension groaned a little as he shifted his bulk, trying to find a comfortable position. He hated riding in Tom’s car, his head pressed against the roof, despite his best efforts to slouch in the seat. But then there was no room for his legs, either. He’d racked the seat back as far as it would go, but his knees were still up under his chin.
Tom Mills wiped furiously at the windscreen with an oily rag, replacing the mist from their breath with smeared streaks of grease and muck. In contrast to Coffin, Tom was small and wiry. He appeared to be older than his thirty-seven years, his skin flaky and blotchy, and his pinched cheeks making him look as though he was constantly sucking on a lemon.
“You ready?” Tom said.
“You sure this is the place?” Coffin said, still staring up at the tower block.
“Yeah, I told you, these are the guys.” Tom stuck a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match against the zipper on his boot, and lit up.
“You sure?” Coffin said.
“Fuck, Joe, yeah I’m sure. One thousand and fucking ten percent sure, all right?”
Tom held out the open packet of cigarettes, and Coffin took one.
Tom lit it for him.
This is the opening scene in Chapter Two of my upcoming horror novel, Joe Coffin. I’d had the idea for a novel about a man called Joe Coffin for a while now. I hadn’t written a character sketch, had no idea about his family or his friends, but I had a fairly good physical description in my head, and an idea about what kind of person he was. When I came to write this chapter (Coffin doesn’t feature in Chapter One) I had a problem. I needed someone sitting in that car with him (good job, as it quickly turned out Coffin can’t drive!) to talk with, and accompany him into the tower block they are both looking at.
Tom Mills’ only purpose, as far as I could see, was for that one scene.
Tom had other ideas.
He quickly turned into a major character in the novel, and the driver for much of the story and the conflict that was yet to come. I love Tom, and I’ve had a lot of fun watching what he gets up to, and listening to his filthy dialogue.
One of my readers told me she hated Tom, and another one described him as ‘loathsome’.
Wow, I thought. That’s fantastic.
Writing a novel for me, when it is going at its best, is like transcribing events unfolding in my mind’s eye. I have absolutely no control over what’s going on, I simply observe, and do my best to accurately convey what I see. Where my finished novel might not work, or is clumsy in places, or cliched, that’s because I got in the way, and interfered. I tried to take over the plot, and steer my imaginary friends in a direction they did not want to go.
But when I step out of the way, that’s when the magic can happen.
That’s not the way it feels when I outline. Then it is more like trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together. Only the jigsaw puzzle has no picture, and I’m trying to solve it in a pitch black room. And there are probably a couple of pieces missing.
The story doesn’t grow organically in an outline. I am simply shuffling cardboard characters around an empty stage, becoming increasingly frustrated and disillusioned as the plot refuses to work, and the characters refuse to come to life.
But hey, that’s simply how I work.
Do you outline, or simply start writing from a basic idea?
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