Tag: the first draft

Outline, Schmoutline: A Cautionary Tale for Pantsers

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I’ve kvelled for most of the summer about my difficulties with my current writing project. Those difficulties are made all the worse by the fact that I’ve been languishing in the mushy middle of the book; that part where the beginning has happened and ended, and we’re working toward an ending that will take up the last quarter of the book. Meanwhile, however, things seem not to be happening with much urgency or importance. I mean, parts are moving that have to move, but much like a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific, there’s some drift happening, and it’s hard to be sure moment-to-moment whether it’s good drift or bad drift. There’s nothing but deep blue sea out here. It all looks the same.

This, to be sure, is where my general go-to strategy for writing hits the wall like a midget riding a crazed pygmy bull. I’m a pantser, not a plotter, because I just can’t be bothered to make outlines. I tell myself and people who ask me (woe betide them) it’s because I write organically, whatever the fargo that means. In my head, it means that I craft the characters and the general situation and sort of “listen” to the characters as they “feel” their way through the situation and find their way through it. In practice, that means I’m basically making it up as I go along. The problem there is that Rome doesn’t get built in a day, and a novel is not written in a week. I’ve been working now for about three, four months on this project, head down, churning out the word count like a good penmonkey, but each day it’s the same. I know generally what has to happen next, I write it, I leave some notes to myself about tomorrow, I repeat. Which is fine for making my word count goals, but maybe not so fine for the story as a whole.

And making the word count goal has been difficult lately, not just because I’m in the doldrums of summer, but because I feel down to my bones the “lostness” of the project right now. It’s hard to make myself write 1000 words a day when I’m not sure where those words are leading me. This feeling would be very easy to mistake for Writer’s Block. In fact, Past Me would have gladly called it Writer’s Block and used it as an excuse to take a seven year sabbatical from the project. It looks like Writer’s Block, it smells like Writer’s Block. But it’s not Writer’s Block. I’m just lost.

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Because there’s nobody really steering the ship. It’s impossible to have the oversight I need to make sure the project is on track while also pushing out about 1000 words a day on this thing. All I can really do is watch the road directly in front of me and make sure I’m not driving into the ditch.

But that’s a problem, because I’m missing the road signs along the way, I’m missing landmarks, I’m not getting much feel for the arc of the story as a whole. I know where it needs to go generally, but it’s been a long time since I bothered to check the map and see whether I’m on course.

And what’s a map to a writer? Unfortunately for pantsers like me, it’s an outline.

And for a month now, I’ve felt that the narrative is adrift, that I don’t know where I’m going, that I’m getting a little lost. Time for a map check.

So tonight, instead of sitting down to pound out 1000 words of narrative, I resolved to do some outlining. I skimmed through what I’ve written so far and summed up the main points of each chapter. Which taught me that, some boring exposition aside, a few less-than-meaningful interactions aside, a few unnecessary characters who will be pruned in future drafts aside, the narrative actually clips along pretty well. Once I get the thing sanded down, it’s gonna hum, baby. Outlining also taught me that I’ve forgotten several details — even some key and important things I planted early in the draft which need to play major roles in the end of the book. They’d just slipped my mind, which is not surprising, because drafting a full-length novel and making it up as you go along is a little bit like juggling the entire contents of your kitchen at once, and then somebody hands you a baby.

So, with outline of everything I’ve written in hand, I’m ready for tomorrow’s session, which is going to be roughly outlining the back half of the book. It won’t be even a quarter as detailed as the outline of what I’ve already written, but what it will do is tell me the plot points I need to steer for when I get adrift again in the coming months of drafting. I’ve already seen, just from retracing my steps over the past couple chapters, what I need to do with the next three or four chapters. Which makes going back to work on the draft that much easier, because I don’t have to make it all up on the spot. I don’t have to find my way across the Pacific just by glancing at the night sky.

I’m here to tell you that I felt silly spending an hour and a half writing out an outline for a book I’ve already written half of. It’s going to be arduous work completing the outline for the prospective ending, especially knowing (as I already do) that that ending will change in some way, shape, or form by the end. But I’m also here to tell you that I see more clearly than I have in months the path that the book has been on and the path it needs to take. Foreign as it felt, the outline has reinvigorated me at a time when I desperately needed it.

So, my advice to my future self is:

  1. Write.
  2. Write some more.
  3. Outline what you’ve written.
  4. Write some more.
  5. Throw the outline out the window.
  6. Make a new outline.
  7. Repeat.

The First Draft: The Shape-Shifting Target

Pavowski2 Comments

Writing, as I think I’ve mentioned before, is an exercise in futility.

You work so hard to craft a story, to chisel characters from the soft stone of imagination and breathe life into their formless husks. You try to communicate themes, to send messages, to tie up loose ends, to suggest ideologies, but it’s all a mug’s game, really. I was reading the other day another blogger’s dismay that her father refused to read the Lord of the Rings series, or watch the movies, on the grounds that it was “satanic”. For all the work that you put into a story, all that matters at the end of the day is what other people make of it.

Which is kind of a bummer, because you can only involve other people so much in the writing of it, which is to say, you can hardly involve them at all. I mean, research aside, 99% of the writing of a story is completed by the author himself, probably in a dark room with no windows, certainly removed from most human contact, except for the plate of gruel that gets pushed through the slot in the door a couple of times a day.

So you try to write a story for other people, but that’s a mug’s game, too, because you simply can’t control the headspace that another person lives in, you can’t sit there over their shoulder to tell them this character is blowing up the village because she really wants everybody to love her. You can’t be there on-call to answer questions your readers have. They make their own meaning, and that’s that, so there’s not much point in trying to steer their interpretations — the best thing you can do is write the story you want to write, and write it as best you can.

But even that’s next to impossible, it seems, because a story has a life of its own. You set out to write a science-fiction thriller and end up writing a teen angst comedy. You set out to write a romance and end up with a twisted love-hate psycho-suspense novel like Gone Girl. My current project has changed from the seedling I started with so many times, I can’t even keep track. It’s a post-apocalyptic horror book. No, wait, it’s a sci-fi mystery. No, never mind, it’s a YA coming-of-age.

It doesn’t stop there. My protagonist is a nerdy guy who has never lived anywhere for more than three months. No, she’s a photography student with a project from a whimsical art teacher on deadline. No, I have three protagonists. And there’s a wild-eyed scientist who may or may not be directly responsible for the apocalypse that we’re living in post of. But he’s really a good guy. No, he’s really a bad guy. No, he’s really a bad guy who pretends to be a good guy. No, wait, he’s just this guy who really doesn’t care about the protagonists, and concepts like good and bad are a little bit like asking whether I want chocolate or vanilla ice cream for dessert, because the answer is inevitably “yes please, a little of both.”

There’s a time machine. No, there are time portals scattered around. There’s an evil robot. No, there are lots of evil robots. There’s a robot that gets captured and reprogrammed to allow the heroes to thwart the system. There are no robots at all, but everybody has biological implants that make them act like robots.

My first draft contains elements of ALL OF THE ABOVE, thrown together and mangled like the lump of junkyard metal that used to be my ’99 Chevy Malibu (god rest that train wreck of a car).

Because the story keeps changing on me, the target keeps moving. Not only does it move, it changes shape and size and color and even, in this case, blinks in and out of existence as it dances through different dimensions of my unsettled imagination.

And there are two ways to feel about that.

Way number the first: get incredibly frustrated. You start a story with a certain idea in mind, you should stick to that idea. Deviations from the path are a waste of time and counter-productive. Bang your head against the wall until the poisonous ideas go away and you find your way back to the one true path that you started with, no matter how long it takes.

Way number the second: Fargo the target. Write what feels good, allow the story to change and shift its shape, allow it to tangle itself up in knots and to contradict its own existence, until it figures out just what the hell it wants to be, anyway.

I feel like I should feel the first way, because that would make me feel more powerful as a writer. You set out to write a story and you end up with pretty much that story, plus or minus a few unexpected elements along the way.

But I’m starting to feel okay about the fact that, deep down, I really feel the second way. Because it’s a lot less stressful writing when you allow yourself not to make perfect sense, when you allow yourself to make mistakes and detour down all the dark, twisting paths in the maze.

Because writing is one of those rare things that you don’t have to get perfect the first time. You get a second bite at the apple, and a third, and a fourth, and in fact you can get a whole other apple after you’ve chewed the first one to bits, because until you’re published, it doesn’t matter if the apple is green or red or golden or filled with worms or made of plastic.

I think it’s okay if you set out to build a tree house and end up building a coffee table instead. Maybe that’s your subconscious telling you that what you really needed, deep down, was a place to put your coffee cups. And magazines. And remote controls. And dirty diapers.

Okay, things got too real there for a moment. Point is, if the target is moving, maybe it’s not the target moving at all.

Maybe it’s you.

And you can argue against it and rail against it, or you can accept that the picture has changed, take aim, and keep shooting.