Sunday 17th October 2021
One thing I’m very conscious about having completed the First Draft of The Accursed is the outline.
The entire story came about quicker than they would normally, and whilst I think I did a good job of outlining it, I ended up chopping off the last third. That was good for the time it took to write the first draft, but it’s left me thinking that this will take quite a bit of work to edit.
As a result, I’ve been looking at outlining tools today.
My usual process is to use the corkboard feature in Scrivener to map out the beats and then turn this into a chapter outline with a 1 sentence summary of the chapter. I can then use this to guide my writing and produce a synopsis.
This fell apart a little due to the fact that The Accursed decided it didn’t want chapters. With multiple POVs, I needed to swap scenes a lot and the chapter structure didn’t seem to fit. I was OK with this but it meant that I ended up with a bunch of scenes and not a lot of structure.
I did follow my outline (other than turning the 2nd act twist into the end of the novel) and I really didn’t stray from it much, if at all. My trouble was that whilst I had this framework I was trying to overlay serval character’s arcs onto it.
The Worthy is a single POV book which should make things easier. But even so I want to have a more detailed outline and I’ve been looking at a few resources into this.
As a result, I ended up building myself an outline database in Notion last night. The idea is that the outline is all mathematical. Specific things need to happen to characters, and those elements of creativity can be fed into a system and displayed so that one flows into the other. So if a character needs an inciting moment, there’s a field for that. Fill it in. Does it map to their decision?
I’ve even allowed it to work with multiple plot architectures. The only downside is that not everything is on one page and I tend to like that, so I may end up ultimately not using it. We’ll see though. I have the tool if I need it. If I use something else, I don’t care as long as I get the end result I want.
There’s still creativity involved, but instead of finding the emotion of a story and then try to construct the LEGO of plot… I build the structure first and then overlay the creativity.
I’ve been watching a lot of prolific authors. They have systems. They’re flexible enough to work with any story but they understand the building blocks of plot. And best of all, their books are not samey.
I’ve dabbled in this, and indeed I think The Accursed would have been a disaster without it. But I want to go further. I’m of the opinion that if I spend time and do a really detailed outline, not only will I be able to write the first draft fast, but it won’t need such extensive edits.
I want to start The Worthy on the 1st of November so I’m going to build these outlines this week in between other work. I may start in Excel and move to my database in Notion, or swap between those and Scrivener. I need to find my way to the outline and as such, I have several tools to play with and find out which I find easiest to use. The end result will be the same.
I think I’m leveling up my craft. I’m really trying to understand the science of storycraft and use that to build the outline. I used to think that would kill all the creativity, but over the years I’ve become more and more convinced that planning and outlining is the way forward, and the more the better.
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