…is advancing into the sketchy, magic-happens-here part of the outline.
I outline only in broadest terms, mostly to get the pacing down and to get an idea of the slice of time…
This doesn’t always work: sometimes an incident turns up that skews your timeline.
The worst thing a writer can do for himself is to follow the outline when the people in the story are saying “but…” and trying to do something else.
But outlines are necessary, I think: when I was a novice writer I wandered through the terrain and then threw out fifty page chunks as irrelevant until I pared the stack of pages down to a novel. Now I have a sort of a plan and a destination, but I always stay alert to other possibilities along the way.
The problem is conventions and, well, life.
Go to a convention, spend the weekend with people asking you about the book you did two years ago, or twenty, and you have to reconstruct that logic flow to answer; or you’re on a panel talking about concepts that belong to a book twenty years back. Or you party a bit, and drop a few stitches there. You get back home, travel-lagged, or just tired; and you sit down Monday or Tuesday morning trying to gather up the thirty or forty threads you were managing. But you only have half a dozen people you’re managing. Thirty or forty? Oh, yes…because every person has several irons in the fire, every person has a history and connections that can be in play, and you have to respect those, because if you don’t watch it, a missed thread can hand you an anomaly, and an anomaly can need to be handled, and handling it to explain how this happened (rather than ripping out 20 pages) can add 20 pages…
These things frequently happen post-convention, post trip, post-life-event, like, oh, having to paint the garage or replace the furnace…
The beat do go on. But that outline will help finding those threads a lot easier. So that’s mostly what the outline is, less WHAT happens as what HAS to happen, logistically, for things to get done, and what plot threads everybody is carrying, and why they have to be on-scene or off- and whose plans are apt to get overturned if X happens, and whether or not they get the clues and where…
Oh, a novel outline is SO not quite the orderly A. B. C. that Ms. Smith taught in 8th grade English.
HUZZAH! for clear water
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As for writing and, indeed, any creative efforts…..The best laid plans of mice and men…….
Before you write, or during writing, do you ever write biographies of your characters?
Personality profiles?
(Outside of the novel’s prose, I mean: as reference material.)
I did once, long ago, but none of those ever ended up in a book that was ever published.
I think there’s a risk in knowing too much about your world or your character before you start writing—because everything you ‘know’ that doesn’t relate to the immediate problem in the book becomes a potential ball and chain that will restrict you from certain paths. Figuring the character will do what’s sensible to do (usually) will guide you to his next thought, and his next action.
But of course you’re playing both sides of the chessboard, so the opposition will not be gathering any moss, either. You have to play both sides with the same enthusiasm, and do horrid things— I recall a certain writer who told me, oh, I could never do anything bad to my hero…and who had to learn that, yes, you can do that sort of thing in a kid’s book, but even so, you have to have some sort of thing at issue, and some sort of risk.
It doesn’t mean it has to be blood and gore. Check out Jane Austen’s plots, and the amount of unspoken tension she can put in a social meeting. Social ruin is a threat quite as potent as gunfire, if you are constrained by circumstance to live there forever. It’s probably worse.
So how a character will consider his options, how he will react to provocation, or threat, or how a simple social situation can parlay into a world-shaking event—is all up for grabs if you haven’t drawn too many restraining lines.
Think of it as stick figures. When you draw a stick figure, it could be male or female, it could be older or younger, it could run or climb or stand there. It could be an astronaut or a business exec or a grandmother in Salem MA. It’s only when you add lines that you pare away the other possibilities. As the figure becomes more embellished, more definite, you can no longer imagine the astronaut or the grandmother…you’ve got a definite someone with boundaries and you know more and more what he is and what he’ll do. If you start your story with stick figures and add those defining lines one at a time as the story unfolds, you’ll find your character and your environment have grown up together, and they mesh well.
But do you find as you write that “developing your characters” is more like meeting someone for the first time and getting to know them over the arc of the story? I mean, it seems to me my characters already know who they are but I have to become acquainted with them over the course of the story, and sometimes I’m surprised when I want to write in one direction, and they say, “Nope. Not going there. Not happening.”
Oh, yeah! It’s the best part of writing. What I love is, now, writing HomeComing Games and still getting that! I thought I knew these characters! 😀 (That happened BIG TIME in ‘NetWalkers! :D)
I keep getting Ideas. And I’m still finding several SF story ideas that I thought were separate story-universes might actually be part of the same one or a few story-universes. So my world-building is in flux. …But I came up with a couple of bang-up reasons why a few things would happen. 😀
But a newbie writer’s question:
What do you do when you write a character or two who are supposed to be supporting cast or spear carriers, extras, almost…but they speak right up and insist they are major characters with full-blown personalities and attributes?
This has happened at least three or four times to me. Each time, I’ve run with it. It seems to make sense. But it threw what else I had in mind out the window. However, they’re strong characters. In one instance, I stopped and decided the new character was really the most interesting thing going on, and scrapped the story, intending to keep the character for something else.
I would guess that means the writer needs to re-evaluate his/her outline, to take the new character into account or focus there. I’d suppose it’s a sign the writer hasn’t thought through the story outline enough yet.
Or am I missing something else, something I should be paying attention to?
On the other end of the scale, I’ve had an image of a character, a visual, revised slightly after trying to write that. But what I was getting, in trying to sketch out (write) the scenario was way too much like (popular TV series) and so…no, that just won’t work. So a few ideas from there will make into something elsewhere, and the character image will make it into something, but the rest of what I’d written…nope, it felt too close to that series to me, which meant it wouldn’t work. If I recognize it, other fans would. Trouble is, it’s one of the popular ways to get around the speed of light problem, so I need…well, I’ll still have to come up with something. This was going to be a different story-universe. So now our daring adventurer and those neat ideas that are usable will have to make it in another story or stories altogether.
One of my biggest problems still is, I’ll be writing or doing whatever else during the day (or night) and an idea will come to me. I’ve learned to write these down. But that tends to get me sidetracked. “Ooh, shiny! Look, a squirrel!” …I’m not, as far as I’ve ever known, ADHD, so this has me puzzled, but it keeps happening. Very annoying.
How do you deal with that? (Help!)
I’m still trying to learn how to juggle with my new newbie skills. This would be a heckuva lot more fun if I had more steady income more often. :-/ But…I’ve wanted to write and do fonts for a long time. I’m enjoying it, dang it. Just…wish I could get everything juggling the same way again. :-/
Heh, but very happy to hear you’re making good progress on the new novel. 🙂 More Bren and associates? Check. More Alliance/Union or Chanur/Compact? Check. These would all be welcome. Though as I understood it, what you’re working on is another Foreigner novel.
I’d thought I’d seen something about Rimrunners coming to Closed Circle? Did I misunderstand? When I’d said hurray on Jane’s blog, she’d said she wasn’t sure, to which I answered, it must be further back in the pipeline, or else I must’ve misunderstood something. Er, if I goofed, sorry.
It happens all the time in pencil and paper RPGs (role-playing games, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term). You may have a ‘campaign’, with goals and a notion of how the players (PCs) are going to get there, but frequently the PCs will go haring off in a completely different direction, and there goes a month of plotting out the airlock in its long underwear! Some of the most fun episodes are where the characters go in a completely random tangent and you have to run after them and herd cats. Once, I dropped characters into a 1930s Middle East bazaar, a la the fight scene in Indiana Jones, accosted by bad guys. They enlisted the help of the local street urchins to disrupt the fight scene I had scheduled, and then sneakily ran away, so carried the day with not even a thrown punch.
Now see, that sounds like fun!
Jane’s got fish pix up. Post on her site!
I love the shock and surprise when a character blindsides me, the author. My character’s father is a gardener because I wanted to set the start of my story in a medieval garden and write some garden porn. One day a couple of years ago, while trotting down the stairwell at work, off to find some lunch, I suddenly put Calum’s (the father’s) earlier, traumatic life pre-daughter together and understood why he had chosen to become a gardener. It wasn’t planned at all, but certainly have made use of that understanding since in the novel.
My character’s aunt, on the other hand, in a seemingly innocuous conversation with her niece,Mor, nicely laid laid a trap a trap that neither Mor or I saw coming at all.
Times like that, the characters feel alive and real and living a life separate from my head — and it is delightful, like vivid or self-aware dreaming, when you’re conscious enough that it is a dream but the dream, rather than you, is directing the landscape and turn of events.
Absolutely. They ‘talk’ to you.
Writing is one of the positive uses of multiple personality disorder…
Or even just the common male bicameral brain? 😉
Back talk is more like it… posit a reasonable course of action, and at least one of them will pop up and say, “What kind of idiot would do that? No! Absolutely not!”
“You didn’t create me stupid.” —Vanye.
I had a character take over, not just the story, but the whole story-verse. I think it was because the character I started off with had a little too much cardboard in his blood. But this one’s such a sweetheart that it was a bloodless coup.