I’ve never been good at outlining. Even in school I could rarely figure out where I was going with a paper or an essay until I was halfway into it. I can reverse-engineer one, but figuring out where it’s going before I’ve even written the first paragraph? Madness! Last November, when I haunted the NaNoWriMo forums, I realized that there were nearly as many ways of planning out a story (including not at all) as there were people writing novels. I tried to outline Dream of a Thousand Stars, but something about the structure of it steered me right into a brick wall. Outlining wasn’t right for me. I completed the novel by NaNoWriMo’s standards, closing the final scene at just over 50k words, but it’s likely to be another 50k words before it’s truly finished. Over the last five months I’ve struggled with filling in the blanks I left and the details I glossed over to get to 50k words, and after a lot of trial and error I’ve found a way of planning my novel that works for me: I’m telling myself my story.
One of the best ways to understand a concept is to explain it to someone else. Rather than trying to boil everything down to a skeleton of the story, I’m writing it up as if I was telling the story of my novel, chapter by chapter, to myself–including commentary meant only for me. It starts like this:
Prologue
So it starts with “Little Fox”: A prologue, 6 years before the story proper, in which Etheris finds Reynard unconscious out in the rain, decides to take the sickly kid in, and learns that Rey is connected in some way to his estranged father’s research. Maybe everyone who says “Never start with a prologue” is right, but for now I like it. It establishes Reynard and Etheris’ peculiar relationship and sets up some mystery for the coming narrative.
This lets me set out goals for both the action of the story and character development without feeling constrained to a particular format, while at the same time adding in editorial notes for future consideration. Most importantly (for me), it’s easy to edit if I come across something later that doesn’t quite mesh with what came before. It doesn’t just tell me what happens in that scene, but what the purpose of the scene is and what it’s meant to accomplish. If I go back to edit and that hasn’t been accomplished, I know it needs some work.
I’m sure it’s not for everyone, but if you’re working on a long piece of writing and outlining just isn’t doing it for you, try telling yourself your story. It’s a bit more work, but it may be worth it.
