Tag: outlining

Stuck: the three narrative mistakes that plunge me into writer’s block

Posted 4 years ago by clpolk
Photo by Aubrey Rose Odom on Unsplash
So i’m in the midst of writing a new novel, and reader, I got stuck. I got stuck so bad that I had to go crying to my agent, Caitlin McDonald, who got back to me with the solution.
And I realized something – just about every time I get stuck while writing a novel, there’s a pattern. When I’m writing a novel and I stall out because something is *wrong* and I don’t know what’s wrong, it’s probably one or more of these things:

1. lack of protagonist agency.

I’m one of those people who gets the plot first, and then has to bolt on a character to do the plot. this is an awkward fit because I know what’s going to happen, because I outlined it, so I often just make it happen to the character.

2. Too much information at once.

For the same reasons as 1. I know all the things. and sometimes I mis-estimate how much information the character should get, as a treat, and mainline a bunch of information all at once, in the form of new characters who know things.

3. Reasonable, rational, thoughtful, cautious characters who think everything through and choose the best solution.

I love my characters, they are precious, and so smart and reasonable, and I know what is the best solution for the problem they face, and so I let them have it.

those are my big three mistakes. I do them without thinking, and then I get to a point in my manuscript where i’m stuck, because something is wrong.

For me, the answer is always to find out which of my three major mistakes did I make in the last 10k words?

In my current wip? All three. oops

So this means (for me) that I have to go back, toss out those words, and start over, keeping these guidelines in mind:

1. Let the Character Act
2. Take some Information Away
3. Let the Character be Irrational

1. Let the Character Act.

Yes, I know I have this shiny plot that goes 0-60 in under 7 seconds and it corners like it’s glued to the track. But when I hit an action sequence, I have to ask myself – how much of this is due to the story happening to the character? Where’s the agency?
I struggle with this because a lot of the time my action scenes are spurred by antagonist action rather than an intrepid protagonist getting her own ass into trouble. But re-visioning the scene in a way that gives the protagonist agency will nearly always make it much better.

2. Take some Information Away.

I like to pace things at what I call a brisk walk. a spirited pace. lively, even. but sometimes in my rush to put the pieces into place I overload the reader with information. I did a thing where i introduced my protag to SIX NEW PEOPLE in a scene–

WHOA THERE. That is a LOT. IT IS TOO MUCH. I have to figure out how to slow that down. I will have more scenes, because I need to introduce my character to all of them, but I need to give them a chance to shine, establish their character, show how they react to my character, etc.
But with more scenes, I can deepen the tension, the conflict, the atmosphere, and the variance in types of scene will be more interesting than me telling the story at a dead run.

3. Let the Character be Irrational

I don’t mean, let the character be completely unreasonable, or that thoughtful, cautious characters are bad writing or anything like that. I mean, people make mistakes. And sometimes they screw up when they’re trying to make things better.

Also, there’s something really relatable about a character who is trying to do the right thing, but doesn’t have enough information to get it right. or the character who gets frustrated and acts on that frustration.

But I let characters tiptoe through a floor scattered with lego, and they never step on a single one.

So my fix is to go back and examine the situation through my character’s – empathetic geniuses, all of ’em – through my character’s negative, fearful, people-pleasing, overly curious, impulsive, petty qualities.

I ask: How can my character screw this up without meaning to?

Once I’ve let the character have more agency, taken away information, and let them be impulsive (a specific subset of let the character have more agency) I’ve repaired what went wrong, and I can keep going. Hopefully you can too.
Special thanks to Caitlin McDonald. Really, this post is because of her.

It’s been a long time since I published a craft blog post, but I haven’t quit talking about craft. I made a Patreon account, and I have posts there about things like 

  • a synopsis writing guide that will help expose structural manuscript problems
  • how to evaluate a scene to make sure it’s doing the right things
  • how to build a story when all you have is a character

I do a new writing related post every month, available to patrons on a sliding scale basis – pick the level of patronage you can afford and you’re in!

Starting in August I am starting a Live Sessions tier, where I will explore a subject about the craft and business of writing on zoom, where you can ask more questions. Look for it then!

How I Abandon Organization While Planning a Novel

Posted 5 years ago by clpolk

Sometimes people look at my process and say, “that’s so organized, I have no idea how you do this in such a tidy way, I could never do that. How do you do it so neatly?”

The answer is that I don’t try, at first. That organization is the last thing I do, not the first.

At first I just write whatever is crowding my mind. No order, rhyme, nor reason. I type this out in gdocs, mostly, though I have been known to do it longhand in my notebook and then transcribe. I title the file “Everything I Know About the Story” and it is a celebration of structureless, stream of consciousness process. I do whatever excites and interests me the most without shame or apology, allowing myself to be illogical, liberated, and limitless. I keep at it until I exhaust all my ideas. This usually is about 20-30 pages of the most RANDOM NONSENSE. It usually takes me about twenty hours.

baks clothing co. (1)

Then, after taking a break of 1-3 days (while I fart about on Pinterest building my “visual aesthetic” and building a WIP soundtrack on Spotify) I go back to the document and start making notes. I write expansions, ask questions, make comments. It’s still a mess at this point, so I feel like I can throw anything at it. I still don’t have to know what I’m writing about. I’m still discovering it this fills out ten to twenty hours of work.

Then I start organizing it into a Microsoft One Note Binder, because that’s what I use for my series bible stuff. I will organize things like “characters” and “locations” and “Culture” and file EVERYTHING. I’m still not writing a story – I’m putting the laundry away, so to speak, so I can find my rainbow colored socks when I need them.

While I’m doing that, I start figuring out the story – like, does this society have a rigid class system/social caste? Where are my various characters on the various layers – are they on the come up or the way down? I especially think about characters. Questions like, who are my characters on the inside? What do they want, and who/what do they have to fight to get it? Who knows whom and how do they interact? What are their secrets? What do they regret? What would they never, ever do, say, believe in? And the whole time I’m thinking:

How can I wreck their lives with this information? How do I use this to push them out of their comfortable holding pattern and into the world story? How do they get involved? Why them in particular, and not someone else? How can I make the stakes higher and the situations worse?

uphold the rule of law.

Inevitably I’ll get more ideas, some of them as proto-scenes. That’s when I start a Scrivener file–so I can make scene cards for these proto-scenes. I’m starting my outline now, so I’m going to start thinking about what the characters expect will happen, and how those expectations get upended. I’ll think about essential scenes for the kind of story I’m telling, and for the kind of characters that are populating it. I usually wind up with about 15 of those kinds of scenes, and they start shaping themselves into the story I want to tell.

Then I wrack my brains working on major story points – what happens to make the character actively pursue the story goal? What happens in the middle that changes everything? What does the character have to lose, and how will I take it away from them at the darkest moment? What is the final confrontation where the character realizes what they have to sacrifice to get what they really want? What kind of life are they starting after their climactic triumph (or loss?)

This is the beginning of organizing, for me. This is where I stop and say, “okay, how long is this story? Whose story am I telling? How many POV characters have popped up? What are their personal arcs? What do they need to do? “What do they need to do” gets me started on sub-plots. I write these stories about incredibly busy people, who often can’t just drop everything and go on a quest – they have jobs to do, people who depend on them, a pursuit that can’t just be set aside.

So if I’m writing a story about an entomologist who is fighting to have a species of lycaenidae recognized as a unique discovery when suddenly her friend and mentor – a well known but controversial figure in insect migration dies is murdered, she’s not going to forget about her aim to have the credit for discovering Arcas tuneta jayalethi (she gets to name the insect, too) or having to return home to attend an important life milestone for her daughter just to go tramping after a murderer. So I will often make a character’s to-do list:

  1. Find the murderer of her colleague
  2. Defend the butterfly subspecies discovery
  3. Go home for her daughter’s debut/graduation/wedding
  4. Deal with her ex-spouse’s involvement in her professional field and their daughter’s life

(I’m going to say that from now on, I think four is a hard limit for a character’s plot-centered to-do list. I’m going to knock that down to two, maaaybe three if I have a story that has more than one character with POV and an arc. There is such a thing as too busy!)

These things create more scene cards in Scrivener. I’ll play with the whole board, arranging things in the order I think they happen, connecting scenes through cause, effect, and consequences, leaving gaps where I feel like I need them.

While I’m doing that, i’m still playing what if with my main characters, and that adds scene cards to the file as well. When I have around thirty or forty, i’ve got most of the story – so then I craft a solid scene-by-scene arc for the first quarter of the story, filling in more information in later scenes, but when I have the first quarter of the book, the middle scene sequence, the darkest moment of the story, the high-stakes, win-or-lose climax, and a glimpse of the character’s life Afterwards, I’m ready to start writing, and that’s a different process post for another day.

It’s been a long time since I published a craft blog post, but I haven’t quit talking about craft. I made a Patreon account, and I have posts there about things like 

  • a synopsis writing guide that will help expose structural manuscript problems
  • how to evaluate a scene to make sure it’s doing the right things
  • how to build a story when all you have is a character

I do a new writing related post every month, available to patrons on a sliding scale basis – pick the level of patronage you can afford and you’re in!

Starting in August I am starting a Live Sessions tier, where I will explore a subject about the craft and business of writing on zoom, where you can ask more questions. Look for it then!

Scene Outlines, Explained in Great Detail

Posted 6 years ago by clpolk

Scene outlines

Scene Outline? What’s That?

Some people outline books with a sentence describing the summary of each chapter. That’s super cool, and my first outline draft/summary is usually about three pages of me breathlessly explaining the story at top level, with the occasional “this is cool!” scene detail. But when i’m sitting down to actually draft the story, I outline the scene i’m writing that day in detail.

Dude, that’s a lot of work.

It is! And it may not work for you. I need to do it this way. If I don’t, I wind up writing scenes that feel aimless, however pretty they might be, and my characters have mellow conversations where they have a good time, but the reader’s probably bored stiff, or I write a fantastic spectacle that doesn’t really advance the story or worse–somebody starts explaining everything.

Or worse, I wander around for three days whining because I don’t know what happens in the next scene, some crucial detail that’s escaping me, and until I know what it is, I can’t write the scene.

You’re right. That is nonsense. The trouble is I fall for that nonsense all the time. I really will sit there and agonize because I don’t know what to do. When I outline the scene, I’m tricking myself into getting out of the circumlocution and examining a tiny piece of the scene at a time, getting it down so I can’t forget or change my mind or find another excuse not to write.

Okay. How does it work?

It goes like this. I open up a comment in google docs/word or a notepad window or I use my Super Fancy Custom Metadata on Scrivener, and I fill in answers for each of these entries:

POVC

Who has POV for this scene? If more than one person in the scene has POV rights, I choose to tell the scene from the perspective of the person

  1. who has the most at stake,
  2. who has to make a decision that will propel the story forward,
  3. Who is more likely to remember this moment when they look back on it in ten years.

So if Alphonse’s stake in the scene is whether he gets to go to his favorite restaurant, and Jimmy’s stake in the scene is whether he can convince Alphonse to go to the new place uptown so he can get a secret glimpse of the woman he thinks is his long-lost niece, we probably want to go with Jimmy’s POV.

Setting Location

Where is this scene taking place? Jimmy and Alphonse could be at home. Or they could be downtown, where Jimmy just finished negotiating a contract that’s going to make his client a lot of money. Or they could be stuck in rush hour traffic, idling in a left turn lane for the second red light in a row. Or they could be exhausted from an afternoon of crowds and nerds at a comic book convention. I decide specifically where, and I work out scene location details using the 5 4 3 2 1 exercise.

Scene Action

What are Jimmy and Alphonse doing in the scene? The setting informs this action. If they’re at home, they could be doing yardwork, changing clothes/doing laundry, sorting mail, assembling IKEA furniture, cleaning up a domestic disaster like a burst pipe or a window left open during a rainstorm. Scene action is a great way to insert a little symbolism, if you’re into that. But get them doing something, whenever possible. It adds energy and vividness to the scene.

POV character’s Goal

What does your POV character want? I talked about this a little bit when I was discussing POV, when I talked about who has the most at stake in the scene, and in this case, it’s Jimmy, who wants to persuade Alphonse to go to a new restaurant for dinner, so he can scope out his Super Secret Niece.

Here’s something that I always try to do when I’m working out a scene goal: I make sure there’s a nice active (transitive) verb in the sentence. Character wants to VERB (character, object, situation.) Active verbs! They’re not just for the work experience portion of your resume!

I have a book. It’s for actors, but I think it’s a great resource for writers. It’s called Actions: The Actor’s Thesaurus. If you have trouble finding nice crunchy verbs, here’s an entire book of them. It’s worth getting in print just for flipping through as a kind of writer’s prompt generator-open to a random page with your eyes closed, stab your finger on that page, write a character Subduing or Charming or Resisting or Emulating in order to get what they want.

POVC’s Motivation

All right. Jimmy wants to go to the restaurant. Why? To see a woman there who might be his niece. Why? Because if she IS his niece, then his 85 year old grandmother will forgive his side of the family, or at least him in specific. Why? Because he found her favorite grandchild, and grandma will be grateful enough to help him financially.

You can and should say why until you get to the root of what your character needs, and what getting it will mean to them. It should be connected to your POV character’s story goal, and appropriate for where they are in the story arc. This feels like an Act I kind of scene to me, so I’m at the early, unenlightened end of the story arc.

POVC’s Emotion

How does Jimmy feel at the start of the scene? Let’s say in the previous scene, Jimmy caught a glimpse of the woman he believes to be his niece on the commute home. He eavesdropped on her conversation, and her voice is right, and she’s going to a specific restaurant that night as a “going away party” but he doesn’t know if she’s going away for a week or forever.

How does he feel? Curious, as many people would be. Excited? Perhaps. Resentful?

Oh my, look at that. Resentful. What a delicious contrasting emotion. Let’s keep it. The gears are turning now, thinking about how mixed up, juxtaposed, and conflicted that jumble of emotions is. Why Resentful?

Complications and Conflict

A scene is a unit of dramatic action. Emphasis on drama. We’ve got a clear goal, interesting motivation, intriguing emotions snaking around underneath–and what a waste all that thinking would be if the conversation went like this:

“Alphonse, sweetie, how about we go to this new restaurant uptown? It’s called Farm, and they only serve food grown or raised within 100 miles.”

“That sounds great, honey. Do I need a tie?”

It’s like Sol Stein said in How to Grow a Novel: “The engine of fiction is somebody wanting something and going out to get it. And if you let him get it right away, you’re killing the story.”

So we need a conflict, and the conflict logically, inevitably comes from Alphonse – if it were a conflict at the restaurant, then the scene setting would be at the restaurant, not at Jimmy and Alphonse’s bungalow while they pull weeds out of the flowerbed or paint a wall or wash dishes or whatever it is they’re doing. If Alphonse is keen to go someplace new, then scrap all this and jump ahead to the part where Jimmy actually has a problem, because what you’re working on isn’t a scene.

So what’s Alphonse’s job in the scene? Alphonse’s job is to have a conflicting goal. He doesn’t want to go to some hipster restaurant called Farm. And he has a reason why he doesn’t. And he feels just as strongly about it as Jimmy does about wanting to get another look at this woman who could be the key to him getting what he needs to achieve his big story goal.

So Jimmy floats the idea–and Alphonse’s reaction is no. Why? He’s tired and doesn’t want to drive, find parking, pay for parking, stand in line, and then pay 28 dollars for an organic grass fed pasture raised hamburger in a restaurant that has a DJ. He wants to put on Birkenstocks and walk to the place on the corner, maybe have one too many beers, and go home to catch a little Netflix. Or he’s already made arrangements to meet some of their friends. Or maybe he has a headache. Or maybe he’s frustrated with Jimmy’s spendthrift ways, and going out to a cool restaurant when they need to pay overdue taxes is exactly the problem with their relationship.

POVC’s emotional shift – what’s at stake if they fail?

So Alphonse says no. What does that mean for Jimmy? It means he will lose his lead on the mystery woman, and so he won’t be able to reunite her with Grandma, so he won’t get on her good side, so he can’t ask her for help with his business, so he’ll be even more at risk at losing it–and maybe the house too, and won’t Alphonse love that? He must go to Farm so he can casually walk by, stop, do a double take, and say, “Nicole?” in exactly the right tone of voice, and that’s worth a 28 dollar hamburger. Hell, it’s worth two 28 dollar hamburgers!

So Jimmy’s desperate. He’s anxious. He’s frustrated, because everything is riding on this moment. He needs to go to Farm and find that woman.

POVC’s response to the Complication

So based on Jimmy’s goals, his motivation, his feelings, and the stakes, what does he do? Does he convince Alphonse with emotional manipulation? Does he pick a fight so he can slam out of the house and go alone? Does he negotiate a deal – come with him tonight, and they can do something Alphonse really wants to do but Jimmy isn’t really enthused about?

Result

By hook or by crook, Jimmy’s going to Farm. He could be leaving a big emotional mess behind as he jumps into his Prius, or he could have a resentful emotionally manipulated Alphonse with him, or maybe Alphonse is riding shotgun, gleefully organizing a weekend of hiking and camping in the nearby national park–with his family. But whatever it took, Jimmy’s in the car and driving toward the next scene.

Dude. Holy crap.

I know. I went into a huge amount of detail, explaining how I go to each piece of a scene arc. When I’m doing this for real, I tend to just write a brief sentence for each. If I’m having a strong vision of how the scene looks, I’ll note down the important parts, or even write a bit of dialogue that’s resonating. In reality, sketching out the details of a scene outline takes only a few minutes, like laying down the basic shapes of a drawing. It’s also handy if I have a vision for a future scene, but I’m not at that point in drafting – I fill out the scene outline, and then I’ll know what I originally intended once I finally get to that point in the story.

It’s been a long time since I published a craft blog post, but I haven’t quit talking about craft. I made a Patreon account, and I have posts there about things like 

  • a synopsis writing guide that will help expose structural manuscript problems
  • how to evaluate a scene to make sure it’s doing the right things
  • how to build a story when all you have is a character

I do a new writing related post every month, available to patrons on a sliding scale basis – pick the level of patronage you can afford and you’re in!

Starting in August I am starting a Live Sessions tier, where I will explore a subject about the craft and business of writing on zoom, where you can ask more questions. Look for it then!

A Visual Guide to a Reverse Outline

Posted 6 years ago by clpolk

107k Words. 76 Scenes. 16 Pages.

What you’re looking at is an essential document for the complex operation that is transforming my first draft into a revised draft. It’s scary, isn’t it? I like to think that it’s beautifully organized.

That’s the entire scene by scene outline of the first draft of Stormsong – don’t worry; there are no spoilers. The color coding is a key – Green means the scene requires very little changing in order to fit in the first draft. Yellow means the scene is mostly ok but will definitely need tweaking for continuity and new details. Orange means the scene is probably going to change dramatically, but the bones will still be there. Red means this scene is headed for The Island of Misfit Words (what I call the file that holds all my cut words, in case I can scavenge them later) and something entirely rewritten will take its place.

How did I Do? Final tally: Green: 15 Yellow: 19 Orange: 26 Red:16 = 76

Okay but what the heck is that?

It’s called a reverse outline, and it’s a fantastic tool for revising your work. It’s a bit intimidating to do, outlining the book you just wrote. I never want to do it. I just want to get on with the revision, but for me, that’s almost always a mistake. The reverse outline shows me exactly what’s going on in my story: strong scenes, weak scenes, scenes that need a little help, and when I’m organized, I can make seemingly impossible tasks into a one step at a time to do list.

I have my own system for analysing the strengths of my scenes, which is customizable depending on what I need to work on the most. You can find a great explanation of the reverse outline on Janice Hardy’s blog, Fiction University, which is where I originally learned it. She gives a rundown on what scenes should contain that will get you started, or figure out what you need to track the most.

For a more complex outline that covers pretty much everything you can imagine, dive into The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne – his Story Grid of the Silence of the Lambs is even scarier and more organized than mine.

What did you use for your columns?

From Left to Right:

  • Scene number and word count
  • Synopsis of the Scene’s events
  • Characters present in the scene – First name in the list is POV
  • The scene’s function in the story, and what plotlines it includes (red ink is political plot, blue ink is magical plot)
  • Notes on what needs to change in order to make the scene fit the aims of my revision

I’m maybe talking about this out of order, but the thing I needed to do was consolidate plotlines, so it wasn’t simply one character working on their own plot but multiple characters coming at the two main plots from different angles, so my columns reflect that. But if I had unclear or inconsistent motivation, I could track that, or if I wanted to track a character’s changing internal attitude, I could do that, or if I wanted to evaluate my story’s pacing, I could do that too.

Does it only work for plotters?

Nope, pantsers can do this too. What you need is a finished manuscript, though, so get those stories finished! If you’re super wise, you could probably do a detailed, all purpose outline grid as you went through the story, so the reverse outline would be done when you are. But I am not that wise, myself.

How long does it take?

I did mine in two days. Now let me be clear. I did mine in two days of splendid isolation, with nothing else to do besides feed myself and wash dishes after, with luxurious naps and frustration breaks playing video games. It might be that you need a week to do this, or two weeks, depending on how many distractions you have to deal with and how practiced you are at it.

But actually, I put off doing this. I full on whined about it. It’s so tedious, so much work, it will take forever, I don’t wanna, the whole shebang. But when I put on my big girl pants and went to work it was about five to seven hours to complete.

What will it do for me?

It will point out the weak points in your book.

That’s a little freaky, and maybe you don’t want to know how much work you have ahead of you. Maybe you want to think the book is fine. I always do. I always think, “this time I did it.” haha! No. This time, I did a little better than last time, and I have a lot of work ahead of me. So know I know that one of my favorite scenes, one of the coolest things I think I did…is smack in the middle of that one page that is solid red and it has to go. But before I did the reverse outline, I thought it was fine. Making this fancy color coded table brings clarity, and to figure out what needs to be fixed, you need to be clear on what’s working in your story, and what isn’t.

What will you do now that you have this?

My next step is to take a week and a day in splendid isolation and write out a scene by scene outline of the story, test-driving the changes I want to make. This is what I think will work best for me and my process – I like to test things before going in and writing them, outlining in detail doesn’t kill the excitement for me, and I want to get another set of eyes on my outline/detailed synopsis before I get started. I have a lot to do in a short time, and Future Me will thank Past Me for laying out exactly what I need to do so I can get it done quickly and well.

If I wasn’t so organization and structure driven, I might just use the reverse outline as a cheat sheet and just go for it, fixing the scenes by intuition and imagination alone. Or I might just write a three page synopsis of the revised story and use that. Now that I have a clear picture of what I wrote, I now have a clear idea of what I need to do to bring the story up to the next level.

It’s been a long time since I published a craft blog post, but I haven’t quit talking about craft. I made a Patreon account, and I have posts there about things like 

  • a synopsis writing guide that will help expose structural manuscript problems
  • how to evaluate a scene to make sure it’s doing the right things
  • how to build a story when all you have is a character

I do a new writing related post every month, available to patrons on a sliding scale basis – pick the level of patronage you can afford and you’re in!

Starting in August I am starting a Live Sessions tier, where I will explore a subject about the craft and business of writing on zoom, where you can ask more questions. Look for it then!

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