Finding the Big Picture

“What’s [your story] about?”

Oh, the love-hate relationship with this question. On one hand, I can natter on ad nauseam about the story of the moment (or any of my stories, really), but I try to respect the time and patience of the questioner and keep it to one or two sentences. It’s great practice for the elevator pitch.

But if I’m in the middle of a rough draft? Don’t ask me this question. Just don’t.

See, I usually don’t know what a story is about until I’ve finished at least the rough draft. And if I think I know what it’s about at that point, I’m more often wrong.

This is why I have to write my outlines concurrently with the rough draft. I can map out 5-7 major points or beats of the story, but anything more detailed stalls out around three chapters. Consistently. Then I’ll switch to writing the draft. I’m an incredibly – frustratingly – slow writer, but I find those three outlined chapters go quickly. I might write a chapter or two beyond the outline, notice I’m stalling out again, and remember to sit down and plan out the next three chapters.

The point is: I’m not great at seeing the big picture.

So I’m taking a wonderful writing class, Diversity and Narrative with Mary Robinette Kowal and K Tempest Bradford, and last class involved an exercise where we had to write thumbnail sketches of our yet-unwritten stories, keeping in mind their types (which would be a whole other post). Mine ended up a total mess, so when the homework of writing an outline was assigned, I was terrified.

Thankfully, I’m working with a short story. The smaller frame allowed me to create the outline, but it was a close thing.

So how do you figure out what your stories are about? Is it something you know from the beginning? Does it change over the process of writing? Or are you like me and just kind of fumble through it until you have a draft (or three) of the damn thing?

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