Outline Madness Wrap-up: Steal This Plot

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Okay, so you have a great setting and characters and you need some more ideas. Here's my last bit of advice: why not steal a plot?

I don't mean from your critique partners. But why not use a tried-and-true template to build on? Fairy tales, Shakespeare, the Honeymooners. My last book starts out with a brother and sister who live with their father. Food is getting scarce, and the new woman in Dad's life wants the old family gone. The brother and sister try to rescue each other. Yup, Hansel and Gretel. There are hundreds of settings and time periods where you could use the beginning of that fairy tale, and a wide variety of characters who would react to that set-up in different ways.

International folklore is another gold mine of plot ideas. Do you know what a ghoul is? In ancient Arabian folklore, dead prostitutes lured men out into the desert and devoured them. I've already got a story idea based on that hook.

Check out this title coming in 2013, The Madman's Daughter by Megan Shepherd. It's based on the fictional life of the daughter of Dr. Moreau from The Island of Dr. Moreau. I really want to read that!

Whether your characters are making a Faustian bargain, getting help from a guardian angel, or being toyed with by a trickster fairy, take that traditional plot and give it a good twist. What bothers you about the original story? Where do you think it should come out differently? I hated that at the end of Hansel and Gretel, the kids run back to their criminally negligent father and the stepmother has magically disappeared. I knew my story wouldn't end like that. Also, it's hard not to be sympathetic to the ghouls. Has anyone ever taken their side before? You will imprint your personality onto the story like that. So it's not really copy-catting. It's,um, drawing from our rich cultural heritage.

-- Kate, Miss Perfecting the Pages

Outlining Madness #4: Okay, Now It's Turning Into Madness

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So an outliner is me. I outlined a trilogy based on a novel I wrote a couple of years ago and started rewriting the novel. And I don't like it. I don't feel like the outline is stiffening the writing or taking the surprise out of it. I just don't like it. Maybe revising an old novel feels like going backwards. Maybe I feel like I should be spending my time working on something more similar to my last novel.

Am I, an unpublished author, talking about branding? I might be talking about branding.

The problem is that my last novel required a lot of research, and if that's going to be my brand, it's going to be very, very difficult to produce in quantity. Which is a pain in the butt. Aren't we new media/new publishing world writers expected to have lots of product on hand? Have we lost the luxury of taking a year or more to write a novel because of the research involved?

Okay, back to the drawing board. The whole idea of having outlines this summer is so I'd know what to write. I went in fully prepared to put aside outlines and first chapters and ignore them. And if that's what I've decided to do ... well, that outline and opening chapters aren't going anywhere, and maybe they'll have some use someday. Ha.

But now I need to write an outline for a novel where I have no idea what the main plot is, I'm not sure   who all the viewpoint characters should be, and that naturally means I don't know where to begin the novel. I'm in pre-outlining mode. I'm Googling things like strip mining and Civil War regiments of colored troops and census names and hoping this all comes together into something.

Anyway, I have a page labeled "Promises to Reader." Actually, it's in my handwriting, so it's labeled "promses 2 readr" but you get the point. There are subtitles for things my setting promises the reader. (Underground tunnels. Fires/explosions.) And there's a subtitle which, in my writing, is YA Genre promses 2 readr. Here's what's under that heading so far:

romance
change
looking ahead, not back
injustice
proactive main characters
making difficult decisions about the future

Right now I've got what feels like 7 subplots but I'm missing the hook. The thing that would make you think "I have to read this book." So I'm still reading and thinking and putting things together, and trying to come up with something that will catch me a fast hook and not push me off a cliff to nowhere.

But this week I'll start sketching out scenes and character motivations, and that will give me the foundation of an outline. And then I'll outline it, write a few chapters, and decide whether to keep going or pick a different story idea from the Acme catalog of half-baked ideas in my brain. And probably somewhere in there, I'll fall off a cliff once or twice. Let the madness continue!

-- Kate, Miss Perfecting the Pages

Outlining Madness #3: Time Keeps On Slipping

Tip of the Day: Taking a long family vacation? Buy Dramamine before you go. It can be tough to find it on the road.

As you outline your new story, think about when the story takes place and for how long. Your outline can be your guide as to how much time will pass in your novel, but the time of year is so important to your setting. For example, here are the last two novels I read:

Men At Arms by Terry Pratchett: Tempers are high as the city suffers through a record heat wave. The summer drought allows people access to subterranean tunnels that are normally underwater.

The Fox Inheritance by Mary E. Pearson: Fake bees used for springtime pollination show how the main character reacts to pain, an important plot point. Later, spring rains cause the main character to use a city-provided raincoat, marking him without him knowing as part of a certain caste.

So think about the time of year and the weather and how it directly effects your characters. Here are some ideas to get you thinking:

1. Tie the weather to your location. Snowstorms in Montana are different than snowstorms in Virginia, and they can both be very interesting. Don't concentrate on making the weather convenient for your characters or putting your characters in a neutral weather season. Let the weather screw them up.

2. Use holidays or upcoming family gatherings for deadlines and tension. My last novel takes place on the Moon underground. No weather, but the book opens with my store-owning family needing sales stock for the Christmas season. Holiday plot possibilities are endless: Halloween, a Bar Mitzvah, a family wedding, Valentine's Day, birthdays ...

3. Where are your characters at a certain time of the year? If your characters are in high school, you may be avoiding summer for a school story, or placing your whole story in the summer to avoid school. Rather than completely avoiding a subject, try to start with a natural beginning. A summer job story might start with the job interview rather than the first day of work, for example. Why does your character need this job?

4. Not sure when to set your story? Research. Let's say you want to write a story about a farming community. Each of the four seasons on a farm has a different rhythm. Which is best for your story? Even if you grew up on a farm, you might need to brush up on different crops or time periods. Reading will give you fantastic ideas. Maybe your Dust Bowl idea would be best set in the summer, but your modern factory farming idea would work best in the fall.

Have a fun time with this part. Maybe your characters celebrate birthdays in a quirky manner. Maybe they have a unique religious observance people would love to learn about. Maybe they get stuck in a tornado shelter. Maybe your story takes place over several years but Valentine's Day always sucks. Maybe your story takes place in the future when the planet is hotter or colder.

So be specific, do some reading and research, and come up with a definite "when" for your plot. It will add another layer of interest and give you fresh plot ideas.

-- Kate, Miss Perfecting the Pages

Outlining Madness #2: Is This Plot Any Good?

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So, I've been outlining plots and I keep wondering: do I have this down right? Because I have a habit of outlining important plot points with one sentence. In my last novel, my main character has to find her boyfriend, who is guarding a high security facility. So my outline says something like "She finds boyfriend, has him sneak her into facility." But then I started writing and realized that there was no way in hell she'd ever get her boyfriend alone. He's a 17-year-old security guard. He's outside of a heavily guarded factory. He can't follow a distraction and go off alone. He at least has to have a partner. So my main character couldn't get in the facility without interacting with the partner. Now I had a new character and had to rewrite the last 2/3 of my novel because I didn't think through that one sentence.

So after you write your outline, study it.

Do have any huge, multi-chapter events summarized in one sentence, such as "they escape"? I'm outlining by scene now, and I realize that what I now think is one scene may end up being two scenes. But I need to look for those red flags where I may have to hammer out more logistics or I'll end up with six scenes.

Is there always adhesive for the main characters in every scene? James Scott Bell uses this term in his popular craft book Plot and Structure. Basically, you should never have a point where any of your main characters could simply walk away and be okay. They have to be stuck to the plot: have so much at stake that they can't change their minds and leave the book.

Make sure reactions are realistic. Once something big happens, make sure you've left room for your main character to react. Big events should change your main character's direction. When she has a huge setback, don't start the next scene as if nothing's happened.

Think about how you can increase the tension between characters. Your characters should not be getting along. Best friends, family, lovers ... put them at each other's throats. Don't rely on your main character starting arguments because she doesn't know what's really going on, though. I like to think of ways the person the main character thinks she needs the most will turn against her. I may not use it, but it's a great exercise in torturing your characters. If you have a character who only exists for moral support, get rid of him or her (or change him to create more tension).

So I think I might list out my characters and write a note about how each of them is making life worse for my main character. This will give me lots of great plot ideas.

Here's a great tip from Rhonda Helms's plotting class: Resolve your subplot before you resolve the main plot. Don't try to wrap them both up at once, and especially don't outline this by writing something like "last chapter: tie up all loose ends." Decide how to resolve each subplot and where, and resolve the main conflict last.

Any other ideas to solidify your outlined plots?

-- Kate, Miss Perfecting the Pages

Outline Madness #1: The Three-Act Structure

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Yay, it's another writing series! I haven't done one of these in a long time. This series is all about outlining. This is my summer of Outlining Madness--I'm outlining a trilogy and a few other books to decide what to work on next and learn the craft of pre-plotting. So come, pull up a comfy chair and learn about Outline Madness on Mondays.

What's the Three-Act Structure?

It took me years to get a Kate definition of this in my head. I went way off-outline in my last novel. As I printed it out, though, I found that the first third all took place in one location; then there was a plot twist. The two-thirds point of the novel brought my characters to a huge crisis. Have I absorbed the three-act structure without really trying?

As I develop a novel idea in my head, before I write a word, I have a succession of images: exciting things that could happen to my main characters. The meaty scenes I really want to write. They may not connect together perfectly yet. The three-act structure is about connecting them together. Something exciting is going to happen one-third of the way through the novel. Something else exciting is going to happen two-thirds of the way through the novel, something that will lead to the exciting climax in the third act. And if you're like me, you've probably figured out how the novel ends before you've figured out most of the rest.

So basically:
-- Something happens to kick off the novel
-- 1/3 of the way through, here's an awesome scene I really want to write
-- At around the midpoint, I'd better plan out something else to keep you interested
-- 2/3 of the way through, here's another awesome scene. After this, it's all downhill to the climax.
-- Toward the end, the climax scene resolves the main conflict

And then, you know, just fill in the gaps between the scenes so they happen in logical order.

So what's one-third of the way through? Depends on what you're writing. A 60K word novel, you've got 20K words to work with. How many scenes or chapters that breaks down to depends on your writing style.

Yeah, But That's Not a Plot, Is It?

No, it's not. It's a structure. I still have to figure out what the plot is. What does the main character want? How would I describe this novel in a sentence or two? Actually, it helps to figure out the plot before you try to plug it into a structure.

So, my main character wants a pony, but she's opposed by the fact that ponies have been crossed with lions and are now bloodthirsty predators.
-- Kick-off: My MC meets the pony of her dreams
-- 1/3 of the way through, pony of her dreams kills her neighbor's dog
-- At around the midpoint, MC and pony run away to the Outerbanks
-- 2/3 of the way through, the Federal Board Against Ponies comes to flush them out
-- Toward the end, the MC rallies the ponies to fight back
-- The climax is resolved when MC goes to live in a protected pony habitat she founds

See, I wasn't even really trying there.

Okay, But That's Not Necessarily a Great Novel, Is It?

In other words, just because I have an outline doesn't mean I'm not going to come up with a better plot as I write. How do I know that my outline is the best possible outcome for the bloodthirsty pony world? Or two months from now, will I realize that the book would be immeasurably better if, instead of a Federal Board Against Ponies, there were hunters killing the ponies for sport? And now I have to rewrite the damn novel. How does my outlining method prevent this?

And that will be the topic of my post next week!

-- Kate, Miss Perfecting the Pages

Summer Goals (Not an Oxymoron)

Tip of the Day: My Chautauqua writer friend Juliet Bond blogs with Swagger Writers. Check out her post on Scholastic's gender oriented non-fiction at http://swaggerwriters.blogspot.com/2012/06/how-to-be-really-daring.html.

Hi all! As a writer, guess what I hate to do the most?

Read rejection letters? Okay, that's it. But I mean besides the obvious.

It's outlining. I hate outlining. Yet somehow, I've committed to myself to create FOUR outlines this summer. That sounds crazy even if I liked outlining. Why have I committed to such insanity?

Here's the thing: I have to start a new project. I've had lots of ideas brewing while I finished my last novel, but none I've explored fully. I have 3 promising ideas, and I'd like to write one of them. But I have a misgiving about each idea. The horror idea seems too edgy in a sex and partying way. The science fiction seems too middle grade but I can't see how to make it into a middle grade completely. The weird western also seems too middle grade, too save the world from a bad guy, but that might be the nature of westerns. Western definitely equals research.

So I'm starting out by outlining a novel I would like to rewrite. I think only the beginning third needs a rewrite and the rest just needs to be revised. But I feel like an outline would reassure me that the plot is on track, and also give me practice in writing a good outline. I plan to use Rhonda Helms's outlining method, as she describes to people who take her plotting workshop. Then it's time to write the three outlines for the books that don't exist yet.

If I get tired of outlining (and I will, I will), I'll have the rewrite to distract me, so I can take a break between outlines. And hopefully, by the end of the summer, I'll be able to do one last revision on the novel I just finished revising and send out queries.

And hopefully hopefully, I'll know which new novel to take on. I actually have a fourth idea for a contemporary that may be too quiet, but how many outlines can one person write? And will this work for choosing the next project to spend a year on? I guess I'll keep you updated!

-- Kate, Miss Perfecting the Pages

Story Structure and Plot (links to helpful sites)

Tip of the Day: outlining can be your friend in the long run!

If you were to check out one of my notebooks or randomly scan my desk, you'd find out that I'm a huge fan of lists. So it's no wonder that when I'm writing or outlining a new book that I like to find a variety of lists to help in the process: from how to structure a novel to important character attributes to include.

Example of Three-Act Structure from www.elementsofcinema.com

Story structure and plot lists, however, are some of my favorite lists to find. Because using one can help you tremendously with outlining your novel. But wading through them can be difficult because there's many different types of suggestions out there: from the three-act structure to the four-act structure and everything in between. So I thought I would make a list (of course, how could I have a blog post about making lists without making a list!) of a few places on the internet to find various story structure or plot lists.

1. Three-Act Structure: a good summary of this can be found on the Elements of Cinema page here. Basically when used to structure a novel (or screenplay--as it's most well known for) you'd have three-acts: set-up, confrontation, and resolution. If you want the three-act structure outlined in relation to novels, here is a good link.
2. Blake Snyder's "Save the Cat" Beat sheet: here's an excellent summary of the beat sheet that basically breaks the three-act structure up into bite-sized sections, from having an opening image, stating the theme, the b story, and a ton more.
   
3. Four-Act Structure: Diana Peterfreund did a nice summary awhile ago on why she likes the four-act structure. She outlined the four acts as:
   

   Act One: Ordinary world and inciting incident
   Act Two: Complications leading to a crisis.
   Act Three: Consequences of that crisis leading to a climax.
   Act Four: Climax and resolution.  

4. Five-Act Structure: here's a good description on bubblecow.net of the five-act structure. Basically the five acts are exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and then the resolution.

   

   Example of Five-Act structure (or the Freytag Pyramid) from bubblecow.net

5. The Snowflake Method: here is an article about that on advancedfictionwriting.com. This is more of a process than how to structure a novel. But you go through 10 steps starting with creating a one-sentence summary of your novel and then ending with writing the first draft.

And if you just want a summary of different ways to plot a novel Darcy Pattison lists 9 ways to plot a novel on her website.

Any other lists or plot/structure outlines that you use? I'd love to hear about them!

--Emily, Miss Querylicious

Outlining Goodness (Or How I Spent Last Weekend)

Tip of the day-- Check out my new cover for The Espressologist!

A few weeks ago I blogged about how I was a proposal writing fool. Well, I'm happy to say that I finished my third proposal late Sunday night and sent it off to my editor. YAY!

In that last blog I talked about how freaking hard outlines were for me. But it's so satisfying when they are done and let me tell you, I DO appreciate them when I go back to work on the book (which I'm doing this week for one of them). I spent all of last weekend outlining and I thought I'd share my process.

It really started before last weekend. For days (sometimes weeks) I brain dump various scenes into a document, cleverly labeled "notes"). When I think I have quite a lot of these scenes I print out the document, get a pair of scissors, and sit on the floor. I cut out each scene and then arrange into an order that makes sense. Like so:




















Then I get more paper out and tape the scenes onto the paper, leaving space between each one in case I need to write in more scenes. Like so:






















After that, I gather up my pages and park myself at Starbucks for three or four hours putting all this into chapters and making it sound good.

Wah la! It's done (Sorry no pic. Imagine pretty pages with paragraphs and chapter breaks.).

I'm not sure how but somehow this seems to work for me. I only got rid of two of those original scenes from the first brain dump. And yeah, I added a handful more but the majority of the outline came from this.

How do you outline?





Kristina, Miss Delighted to Debut