Huh. The title to this post sounds a bit like a self-help book,
but it's really a musing about my process for starting to write. I suppose a
more enterprising soul could draw parallels to life-journeys, but I’ll keep
this to writing.
When I was in college, I had an extremely
organized friend who was absolutely brilliant with outlines. You know, the
whole 'I, II, III' and 'A, B, C' thing. She would initially start her project
in traditional outline form, and then expand it with more and more detail as
her research came together. Finally, she would pull out all the 'I, II, III'
and 'i, ii, iii' stuff, add punctuation and formatting, and call it a day. Her
outline grew into the finished product.
As for me...well, I would start out with 'I.
Introduction' and 'V. Conclusion,' and maybe get as far as the second tier of
the outline before scrapping the whole thing to just start writing. My
professors were often very annoyed with my hemming and hawing, particularly
when an outline was a required stage of the project.
I maintained, then, that the outline was
an artificial structuring for my thoughts: if it didn’t help me reach my
objective of a finished essay, why should I bother? I think better in
paragraphs.
Even to this day, I don’t write traditionally structured outlines,
but my attitude to the process has changed somewhat.
Outlines are about the plan, about knowing where you are going and
why. Given human limitation, most of us can’t hold in our brains tons of
information and all its relational detail with communicable clarity without
writing down at least the bare-bone ideas. And when we write it down, we
organize it so that the steps of logic are retained.
This is plotting, pure and simple. (More practical folks may read ‘plotting’
and think of maps; devious folks may involuntarily cackle…both would be
correct.) An outline’s structure - artificial though it may be - serves to highlight
relationships, orders of logic, so on and so forth. A paper or story that doesn’t
pay mind to the relations between topics and the inherent logic of a subject is
more than likely unreadable. And that just sucks if you’re the reader.
So what’s a writer to do if a series of Roman numerals and
alphanumeric combinations stall a thought process?
I’ve come across several alternatives in my time as a writer, and
I’ll list a few I’ve found beneficial.
One more well-known fiction writer says he finds himself a giant
piece of paper, puts a line on it with the story’s end state on one end and the
beginning on the other, and then adds the major plot points at various
intervals along the line. He then fills in the details as they occur, until he
has a chronological and linear representation of the plot.
Another option is sort of like brainstorming. It can be either an
entirely mental exercise (not to be attempted if your memory is poor), or accompanied
by note-taking; either way it’s usually a very free-form, tangential-thought
sort of process. In this method, a writer envisions the plot from beginning to
end, tracing out the steps that will take the story/essay from point A to Z.
The writer may ask him- or herself ‘well, what would provoke this?’ or ‘this
needs to happen, but how?’ or ‘why might my character think this?’ - and goes
from there. At a certain point, after at least the major plot strokes have been
resolved, it all goes on paper.
Finally, there are plot sketches. Once again, the writer must have
an idea of the beginning and end, but then sketches a single character’s path
along the route from A to Z. Or Z to A - whichever works. In focusing on the
single character, the author does not worry overmuch about plot holes, instead
tracking that one character’s journey. Then the author moves to a second character
and so on, until by sketching each of the main
characters/villains/protagonists/antagonists/etc., the plot is described more
or less in full. This works when a story follows several characters throughout
and each one’s individual story advances the overall plot. It’s kind of like
weaving.
I prefer the latter two, though I like to mentally hammer out
where I’m going with a story before I put pen to paper.
Even after I've finished my plotting and started writing, though, sometimes I have to pause and reconsider
the logic. For instance, when I was writing the story I just published
(Convicted Innocent), I had to pause toward the end to figure out what sort of
scene the bad guy would likely have put together to trap the good guys. My
original intention no longer fit: it wasn’t devious or insidious enough for a
bad guy supposedly known for his sleight of hand. So I had to retrace the logic
I’d established before and come up with a climax suitable for all characters
involved, since my heroes had to find some sort of resolution in that scene as
well. The published result worked pretty well (in my opinion).
That last bit illustrates a very important thing about outlining
and plotting: writing, no matter how well mapped out, must remain fluid. If
something doesn’t work, a writer must suck it up and get rid of it, and an
outline is but a tool to get to the finished work. Eventually, all those I, II,
IIIs, and the sketches, and the plot lines drawn out on big sheets of paper
must be set aside so the writer can do just that. Write.
But only after plotting. Cheers!
