“Outline - 1) A line showing the shape or boundary of something; 2) A statement or summary of the chief facts about something; 3) A sketch containing lines but no shading” - Oxford American Dictionary

If you want to be a professional novelist, odds are that sooner or later, you’re going to write an outline. In fact, I would go so far as to say that eventually, you will have to write an outline, which is an extremely rare sort of statement for me. But what I mean by “have to write an outline” is not what most people think I mean.

This is because there are two types of outlines that are commonly used by professional writers, and one of them is entirely optional. The first, and the one that most writers will have to do sooner or later, is the outline that’s meant to sell a book (which can be further subdivided into outlines of unfinished manuscripts and outlines of finished manuscripts). The second is the planning outline, which writers do for their own guidance. It’s totally optional; whether you use one of these or not should depend on whether it helps your process or not.

An outline meant to sell a book fits under #2 of that opening definition:  it’s a statement or summary of the chief facts about the book, with maybe a bit of #1, a verbal line showing the shape of the book. If the book isn’t finished, the shape may be a bit vague and some of the facts may not have been determined yet; if the book has been written through at least a full first draft, the shape should be clear and the facts solid. Otherwise, the outline for a book that hasn’t been finished yet and the outline for a book that has are usually quite similar in form and general content - the main difference comes when you sit down to write the one for the unfinished book and realize just how much you still don’t know about what’s going to happen.

Note the emphasis on facts and shape, BTW. The two main things an outline-to-sell needs to do are: 1)  name the main characters (not all the characters, not your favorite characters, but the main characters, which even with an ensemble cast usually means maybe three or four on the side of the protagonists and maybe two on the antagonist side. If you find yourself wanting to name more, you should stop and consider carefully whether you really need to name them. What’s needed in a 100,000 word novel may not be in a five-page plot outline) and 2) summarize the major events and key plot points of the story.

A sales outline is not the place to play coy games about what happens or how major plot events occur, if you know them. “Jack is imprisoned, but escapes the dungeon with help from a guard who changes sides” is acceptable, or even “Jack is imprisoned and escapes,” if you’re short on space. “Jack has many exciting adventures” is right out, unless there really are far too many to fit in five pages, in which case you give a couple of specific examples: “Jack is captured by pirates, marooned on a desert island, unjustly imprisoned and escapes, and has many other adventures before discovering that his real destiny is…”

There are also length restrictions on outlines you’re sending to a publisher:  five pages is the norm, but a few publishers request one-page or two-page outlines. If they specify, give them what they ask for. There really isn’t a standard format for a selling outline, though some publishers will ask that specific points be covered.  I just write a summary of the central plot, but some people prefer to do a chapter or section breakdown, or Dramatis Personae plus a paragraph of plot summary, or…well, there’s lots of variety.  Again, if the publisher says they want a particular format, do it that way. Rewriting five pages of outline shouldn’t take that long, and you never know - looking at your story that way might tell you something interesting about it that you didn’t know before.

There is no point in writing a “sales outline” for short fiction. Magazine and anthology editors don’t want them; it takes more time to read an outline, send a form letter asking for the story, and then read a short story than it does to just read the short story in the first place.

When it comes to the second sort of outline, the one writers do for purposes of guidance and planning in actually writing the novel, all bets are off. I’m going to talk about that next.

What fact? The fact that they’re running a business, and they’re going to have to pay taxes on the net income.

It amazes me the number of folks who behave as if their writing income is a non-taxable freebie if they already have a day job. They don’t pay quarterly tax estimates or up the withholding from their day jobs; they don’t set aside part of their payments so that they’ll have the cash on hand when tax day rolls around; some of them even try to skip including their writing income on their tax forms entirely. And then they complain in bitter surprise when the IRS comes around demanding its cut.

The IRS doesn’t care whether you’re having fun or pursuing your dreams or making a contribution to great literature:  if you made money doing it, they want their share, and if you didn’t send it in, they charge penalties. Fairly draconian penalties. Nobody likes this, but it’s a fact of life that can’t be avoided by hiding one’s head in the sand.

I have slightly more sympathy for those who thought about this aspect of writing, but drastically underestimated how much of a cut the IRS was going to want. This is usually because they either forgot about FICA (Social Security taxes, to most of us), or didn’t realize that they were going to be paying twice the rate that’s withheld from their day job paychecks. That’s right, twice. Writers count as self-employed, which means we have to pay the employee half of the FICA tax and the employer half. That’s roughly 15% of the check, right off the top, no matter what tax bracket you’re in.

I take that back: if you made more than $106,800 in 2009, you hit the FICA ceiling and only have to pay the 15% on the first $106,800. But there aren’t many writers who make that much in a year, and there really aren’t very many new writers with that kind of income.

Those who forgot to set money aside (or didn’t realize) don’t have a lot of options. I’m told the IRS will negotiate, if they think you acted in good faith. People who just skip filing tend to end up with their wages garnisheed or their houses and cars being seized.

And let’s not even start on “sneaky” ways to avoid taxes. The IRS has been around for a long, long time, and they’ve seen just about every loony tax write-off you can think of (and probably a lot you can’t imagine). You can’t deduct your cat as an employee or “inspiration.” You can’t deduct your sweatshirt and jeans (or your evening gown or tuxedo) as a “work uniform.” And you can’t avoid taxes by taking payments “in kind.”

I know someone who tried that. She was published by a small press, and elected to take her advance in books instead of in cash. She traveled around and sold the books at her autographings and speaking engagements (she was really quite good at that part), and then spent all the money buying more books to sell, in the smug certainty that she didn’t owe any taxes because she didn’t have any money in her account. And then was completely appalled when she got a 1099 form from her publisher for the full amount of her advance, on which she had taxes due. She was even more appalled to realize that she also owed tax on the sales of her book, even though she’d spent all the money buying more books.

See, as far as the tax people are concerned, she got paid her advance and then spent it on books (even though the publisher never sent her an actual check, just the books themselves). The tax people don’t care what she spent it on; they care that she got paid, and they want their cut. Then she sold books, and they want their cut of that. Of course, she could deduct the cost of the books (the advance) from the income she got from selling the books…but she hadn’t kept track, because she was so positive that as long as she didn’t build up any cash in her bank account, it was all non-taxable. She had a hard time scraping up enough cash that year, but I believe she learned her lesson.

Obviously, a lot of the specifics of this are going to differ, depending on what country you live in, but the principle is the same: check out the tax rules earlier, rather than later, and don’t play games with the tax people. Me, I have an accountant…and not because I make tons of money (I don’t), but because the tax rules are so complex and ever-shifting that it is a full-time job keeping up with them. And I already have a full-time job.

This closet is really hard to photograph so that you can see that it’s a closet and still see the picture - it’s in the upstairs hall across from the stairs, so I can’t back up enough. So all of these are kind of close-up details. Anyway, in this picture, you can just see a bit of the shelf and the clothes-rod in the upper right corner.  This is the back wall that you’d see when you open the door, with the Lost Boy’s tree (their underground hideout is further down) and the pirate ship.

 
And this is what’s on the bottom right, positioned so he’s looking hungrily up at the pirate ship. He’s the only actual figure in this one. There’s also the mermaid’s lagoon, up above him:

And last but not least, there’s Skull Mountain, painted on the inside wall just above the shelf, where you can only see it when you walk into the closet and look back out the door:

You can see a bit of my upstairs hall and the hall window over on the left.

This is why I have hardly any actual storage space left in my house.

“It really happened” is just about the worst justification for having something happen in fiction that you can have, because fiction, unlike real life, has to make sense.  People will believe things in newspaper stories that they won’t believe in a piece of fiction.  Also, most writers don’t have terribly exciting and interesting lives (at least, very few people I know are interested in reading about somebody who sits at a computer and types for between four and sixteen hours a day).

Yet most people who have taught writing for more than a class or two have run into folks who object to criticism of their stories “because that’s what really happened!” We deal with it in various ways, from the over-stressed and rather nasty “Then perhaps you should be taking a journalism class!” to the more gentle “I believe you. Now make me believe your story.”

Whatever the approach, the it-really-happened folks always seem (in my experience at least) to be remarkably hard to convince. I personally think that comes about partly because they’ve bought in to the most literal interpretation possible of “write what you know” (after all, what do you know better than something that’s really happened to you?) and partly because they don’t trust their own imaginations enough.

The “write what you know” part is positively frightening at times. I had a student at one point who came to me for tips on how to ride a bicycle off the roof of his garage in order to “find out what it feels like to ride a dragon.” I pointed out that people who write murder mysteries do not go around murdering people, and also that no one has ever actually ridden a dragon and therefore any minor flaws in his description were likely to go unnoticed, and suggested that he simply sit and think about what it might be like for a while.

It took me a good half-hour to persuade him.

I don’t really know where this attitude comes from. I don’t think most people really believe it, deep down (if they did, writers who write “spicy” Romance novels would be in much more demand as dates), but when they get to actually trying to write something, they get all insecure and want to be able to point at something outside the story and say “see, I’m not wrong; this is how it really works.” The trouble is, the author can’t go around to every single reader and say “This is what riding a dragon really is like; I know because I rode a bicycle off the roof of my garage to test it.” The vast majority of readers will only ever have the words on the page, so it’s the words on the page that have to be convincing. Not “real life.”

One of the problems with writing longer fiction - and by “longer” I mean “longer and more complicated than what you’ve been doing,” whether that means you’re moving from drabbles to short stories, from short stories to novels, or from novels to trilogies or series - is that whatever plotting method you’ve been using often quits working at some point when you start writing longer. So if you’ve been flying by the seat of your pants, you may have to plan, or you may need to do more rearranging of things once the first draft is written. If you’ve been planning, you may need to let go…or you may need to dig deeper, or, again, rearrange things a lot more afterward. At the very least, even the most intuitive of writers often finds it necessary to do something to keep track of where everyone is and what stage of the plot they’re at.

The other thing about longer works is that they tend to be more complex in terms of plot, because there is more room for things like ensemble casts (three or more main characters, each of whom has his or her own major plot thread), braided plots, and subplots, to say nothing of structural variation based on plot. If the writer has been used to doing fairly straightforward linear plots, the increased complexity can result in much tearing of hair. Using calendars, maps, spreadsheets, and other physical diagrams can help a lot with keeping things consistent, whether one does the diagrams, etc. before, during, or after writing the first draft.

I’ve already talked about the basic plot skeleton.  Each plot thread, each strand of a braided plot, each subplot, has its own pattern of ups and downs. The more strands and subplots there are, the more attention the writer needs to pay to how the ups and downs fit together. Again, a lot of us do this by instinct and intuition, but I find that it still helps to back off, disentangle the plot threads, and look at whether maybe the reason things feel a bit flat is that the major plot thread is consistently hitting a low at the same time as two subplots are hitting a high, and they’re canceling each other out.

Exactly how the writer goes about doing this depends on what suits their particular process and mindset. A lot of writers use spreadsheets to plan or track characters and subplots (I’m using “plan” for laying things out in advance and “track” for doing it while writing - at the end of each chapter, say). Formats vary, but a common one is to have chapter1/scene1 running down the side, and columns for which characters appear (or are central) in the scene, scene location, which plot threads or subplots are advanced, viewpoint (if it’s a multiple-viewpoint story, which long stories frequently are), who has the McGuffin, etc. - anything the writer wants to keep track of.

I find flow charts helpful. You can still find those plastic guides for making them in office supply stores - the ones that have cutouts shaped like diamonds, circles, squares, etc., meant for computer programmers. With one of those and some colored pencils, I can have hours of fun diagramming what’s supposed to happen to my main characters, where their paths cross, what their relationships are and how they change, etc. Post-It Notes (TM) are another great resource - I use different colors for different plot threads and write a brief scene summary on each one (”Lan loses temper” “Wedding planning”) and then lay them out in order. If I get too many of one color bunched up together, I know that I need to move things around so I don’t lose track of a bunch of my plot threads.

Storyboarding (or a variation of it) works well for some visually inclined writers, even if they can’t draw and aren’t working on a film script. It can take a while to draw out a bunch of comic-like panels, even with just stick-figures and captions, but it really does strip the various story lines down to their essentials. Even just a three- or four-word scene summary with no pictures can do the trick. Telling the story to someone in all its complexity can be incredibly useful, if only because you find all the places where you have to keep backtracking to explain things (and if you do it with a pen and paper handy, you can jot down the order that seems right for telling it, which may turn out not to be what you thought would work when you were plotting it all out on paper.)

There are also computer programs out there that can help track complex plots. I haven’t played with a lot of them personally, but yWriter and Storybook are two that I’ve found useful from time to time. I’m sure other folks can recommend things, too.

I have, however, had the opportunity to observe several writer friends as they produced various series and true multi-volume stories, and it seems to me that from a process standpoint, there are several types. Start with plotting: there are closed series and open series. A closed series is one that has a specific end in mind: after four or five or six or ten volumes, the protagonist(s) find the magical doohicky, recover the throne, save the universe, and it’s finally over. An open series is one that has the potential to keep going on and on, because there isn’t a background plot-arc that will ever be finished. The Enchanted Forest Chronicles in their current form are a closed series: the primary adventure is finished and the wizards are defeated for good. If I ever go back and write another of them, it’ll have to be about some completely new adventure, with a new antagonist (no, I don’t need suggestions, thanks… )  The Lyra books are an open series - they share a setting, but that’s really all. Lois Bujold’s Vorkosigan series is another example: Miles and his family are central characters, but each book is generally a separate adventure. There are a couple of story-arcs that cover two volumes, but none that string out for longer than that. Mystery series that follow a detective through various cases are another example.

Writing a book in an open series doesn’t differ much from writing a complete stand-alone, except that the writer has to pay a bit more attention to staying consistent with everything that’s been said in earlier books. (Unless the writer is Terry Pratchett, whose History Monks are possibly the most brilliant device ever thought up for justifying and explaining any and all background inconsistencies whatsoever.)

Writing a book in a closed series is a lot more complicated.  In most cases, and especially if the closed series is going to be longer than two or three books, the writer doesn’t want the current volume to read like a couple of chapters out of the middle of a stand-alone novel, yet progress has to be made toward the final series-ending goal or the series will stretch out to infinity without resolution and start losing readers after a while. This usually means that the book has to have a minor plot-arc or sub-adventure that can be finished up within one book, but that also moves the characters closer to their ultimate goal. And those two plot-threads have to be carefully balanced in the context of where the characters are in the whole series.

The structure of a long, closed series also needs careful attention (unless you’re the sort who does structure and plotting on a completely intuitive level and you can make this work over a multi-book project). The longer a closed series is, the more sub-arcs the story needs, to keep the reader interested and provide enough closure to avoid frustration (while not providing so much closure that they stop reading).

The other problem with a long closed series (one that runs for more than four to six novels) is that the writer frequently gets bored after four or five books if the end is still not really in sight. A bored writer is a dangerous thing. Quite often, this results in one of two things: either the writer starts branching out, doing side-stories and adventures for minor characters that have nothing to do with the central story-arc, or the writer sticks to the central story arc but stops paying attention. In the first case, all but the most dedicated readers eventually stop reading the series (since it isn’t getting any closer to a conclusion); in the second case, the quality of the books tends to drop, at which point, again, all but the most dedicated stop reading.

A good series, whether open or closed, provides a lot more opportunity for richness and complexity in both characters and background than a stand-alone novel. Plot…plot is another thing entirely. There aren’t really a whole lot of plots that need more than three or four books to tell, even in great detail.

Since this is getting a bit long, I’ll talk about specific tools and techniques for keeping tabs on a multi-volume story in another post

In a word: closure.

At the end of the story, whether the heroine won or lost, she’s not going to get another chance to try.  The Evil Overlord is gone for good, the wedding is on (or off), the murderer has been discovered and arrested. There may be some loose ends, but the main thing is over and done with…whatever “the main thing” is for that particular story.

In order to achieve this, the story first has to provide a question that needs answering, or a problem that needs settling. Will the hero get the girl? Will the detective catch the murderer? Will the Evil Overlord get a date for the prom?  The ending is the moment that provides the answer, whether that answer is Yes, No, or even Maybe.

That may seem obvious, but a lot of the beginner stories I see fail to present a central problem or a main question, and as a result they have serious difficulty finding a point of closure. Mostly, they end up sort of petering out and stopping, and their authors agonize over their inability to write endings. But their problem isn’t really with their ending - the problem is that they never set up anything that could come to an end point. You can’t close a door if no one ever opened it in the first place. The only fix for this is to rewrite the piece around a problem or question, so that there’s something to answer and a way to end. So that it’s a story and not just an incident.

Other writers overshoot the end because they’re looking for the perfect boffo closing line. It’s lovely when one gets a boffo line to end on, but it doesn’t always happen…and it’s usually much more effective to stop at a reasonable point than it is to make readers slog on through pages or chapters of filler, waiting for a punch line. The flip side of this is writers who cut things off abruptly as soon as the main problem is solved, without providing any wrap-up validation (of which more anon).

Still other writers string their endings out - first the scene with the action climax, where the heroine kills the dragon; then a scene for the big revelation, where the hero tells her he’s not her long-lost brother; then the emotional climax, where one of them proposes; then a scene for the climax of the secondary plot-thread, where the grand vizier runs off with the kitchen maid; and so on. Sometimes one does have to handle each thing separately, but it is often more effective if one can figure out how to bring as many of the threads together in one scene as possible, and tie them all up at once. Unlikely as it may be for the hero to propose in the middle of fighting the dragon while the vizier and kitchen maid try to sneak past the fray without getting killed, it’s often more convincing as a climax or ending scene (if, of course, one can pull it off). At the very least, the revelation and the proposal can usually go in the same scene.

The last mistake I see a good deal of is writers who don’t provide any wrap-up or validation after the big climax scene. Wrap-up is the bit where you let the reader find out how some of the minor subplots turned out, or what happened to other interesting characters while the hero and heroine were busy with the dragon, or where you tie up any loose ends that are still flapping around now that the main plot-problem is solved. Validation is something to let the reader know that it really is all over now; they really did succeed. In my standard plot outline, the ending is usually described as “there is a big fight and the good guys win; this is followed by awards and weddings, as appropriate.”  The “big fight and the good guys win” is the action climax; the “awards and weddings” is the validation. If you get a medal, it means you really did win…for this book, anyway.

I still have a to-do list as long as my arm, but at least it’s new stuff to do, and I can do most of it from here instead of having to be there. For a while, anyway.

Needless to say, no writing got done.

Which is the long-winded explanation for why it will probably be another few days before I get to the next blog post. And if anyone has anything they want me to blather on about, I’m open to suggestions.

And I am now going to go take a nice hot bath (even with good weather, the 8-hour drive today was hard on my shoulders). See you all later.

For those of us who write fantasy and science fiction, worldbuilding is even more of a necessity. The places our stories occur often have no real-life analogs; one cannot travel to Edoras or Cair Paravel to check out the sights and sounds and smells. One cannot look up the fashions of the Galactic Empire or the social customs of the kzinti or Klingons. The writer makes them up.

One of the first things you find out when you start paying serious attention to this is that every detail you invent implies other things, large and small. A codfish dinner served in a town far inland implies not only a fishing industry, but fast and reliable transportation (or the fish would spoil before they got to the table). The existance of such fast and reliable transportation means news will move as quickly as the fish do, so if you want it to be three weeks before they find out about the magical thunderstorm on the south coast, you suddenly need to come up with a really good reason why they wouldn’t hear about it a day later like everyone else. And so on.

Back when I was still getting the hang of all this, I discovered that one of my biggest problems with making forward progress was that I’d forgotten to make up some aspect of my imaginary world that I suddenly needed. The heroine arrived in a new town, and I’d forgotten to make up the architecture; the city guard showed up and I had no idea how they worked; a foreign diplomat arrived and I had no idea what he considered a proper, respectful greeting and what he considered an insult.

So I started keeping track. Fast-forward ten years or so. I had a twenty-plus-page list of things to think about, and it was still growing. I mentioned this on the Fidonet echo I was on, and people talked me into posting the list. One thing led to another, and my fantasy worldbuilding questions have been up on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ of America web site for … I think it’s getting on for fifteen years now.

Every so often, I get complaints about them. Interestingly, the complaints are always that I left something out, not that X or Y is not really important to worldbuilding. I always tell the complainers the same thing:  The fantasy worldbuilding questions are my list of things I have a tendency to forget to think about. Stuff that I always remember to think about is not on my list. If they forget different things, they should make their own list of reminders.

But people persist in trying to make the questions into a prescription or a recipe. And of course, once again, there is no  one recipe or set of rules that work for this aspect of writing, any more than any other. I know quite a few writers who do little or no worldbuilding in advance - they have the sort of brain that needs to not be tied down to a previous decision (and they also seem to have a gift for making everything tie together, even if it was made up on the fly).

When your first-person narrator looks at the street outside his house, does he see Fords and Chryslers and Saturns? Or does he see red vans and silver cars and a blue pickup? In other words, is he the sort of person who knows all the makes and models and maybe even the year, or are they just all cars to him? When she sits on a rock under a tree, does she notice that it’s metamorphic limestone and a fine specimen of  Acer saccharum, some kind of unpolished marble boulder and a sugar maple, or just a rock and a tree?

In a third-person viewpoint, the writer can fudge the narrative a bit even if she’s doing a tight third-person point of view, and let the reader know that it’s a sugar maple even if the viewpoint character has no clue. In first-person, you can’t fudge. If the viewpoint character says “I sat under a sugar maple,” then obviously she knows it’s a sugar maple.

This seems like a small thing, but it can come around and bite you when you least expect it. You have your viewpoint character describe a tree or a car or a horse in specific terms, because you know what it is and you want the reader to get a clear picture of the scene…and then four or five chapters later, the character says he doesn’t know the difference between an oak and an elm, or a Saturn and a Lexus, and any reader who’s at all noticing goes “hey, wait a minute, he used to know that…” Or worse yet, you turn out to need him to know (or not-know) something as part of a major plot-point. If it’s first-person, the only thing to do is go back through everything and hope you catch every place where you might possibly have said something in the narrative that indicated differently.

Of course, this can work to your advantage, too. If the first-person narrator describes elms and sugar maples by name, but just “red cars” and “blue cars,” then when the plot requires him to not be able to identify the robbers’ getaway car, he doesn’t have to say that he can’t tell one car from another. It’s already there, in the word choices he’s made every time a car came up in the narrative.

Furthermore, this cuts both ways with the worldbuilding as well as the characterization, especially if you’re a fantasy or science fiction author writing in a completely imaginary world. The reader builds up a picture of the world from what the narrator says, and how she/he says it. In first person, you have to be a little more careful, because the reader can’t tell whether the first-person narrator is omitting details about the trees because they’re unimportant and/or the same as in our world, or whether she just doesn’t know what sort of tree it is. Yet you can also use things like the way the narrator takes purple carrots for granted, or thinks of lemon-flavored streams as rather commonplace, to tell the reader things about the world that are a lot trickier to get across in third person.

In fact, one of the things that is, for me, the most fun about writing first person is that the narrator can have attitude. Her opinions about people and things don’t have to be implied or shown; she can just say them straight out. “I hate pickled beets.” “Donald is stupid.” Because of this, though, first-person is almost inherently unreliable. That is, the reader is predisposed to believe what the first-person narrator says, so if the narrator lies or doesn’t know what she’s talking about, it’s a lot harder to let the reader know that she really does like pickled beets and is just grousing, or that Donald actually could have been a rocket scientist if he’d wanted to.

Every type of viewpoint has advantages and disadvantages like this, and eventually, I’ll probably get through most of them.