I’m still working on revisions, and one of the first things I did was to make what I think of as the real outline of the story. I haven’t seen much, if any, discussion of this technique, so I thought I’d talk about how I do it and why.
I start by summarizing what I’ve actually written, chapter by chapter and scene by scene. And when I say “summarize,” I mean that I keep it as short as possible. I include the location, timing, the main characters, the one or two significant plot events … and anything that I know I’m going to need to be able to find, like the setup for something that becomes important later. On the rare occasions where I’m writing multiple viewpoint, I include the viewpoint character.
The layout of my retroactive outlines depends on what I think I’m going to need to look at. Timing is nearly always important in some way – for Daughter of Witches, I labeled every chapter as “Day 1” or “Day 2, evening.” For Thirteenth Child, the chapters were “Eff is 5,” “Eff is 8,” “Eff is 10,” etc. For the current book, the chapters have headers like “End day 3, Zaradwin; End Day 1, castle” because the two significant time-points I wanted to keep track of were how long they’ve been in Zaradwin and how long it’s been since they got to the castle.
While I am writing up the retroactive outline, I often spot problems. For instance, the first couple of chapters in the original retroactive outline went something like this:
Chapter 1: So You Are A Potential Dark Lord
Day 1, State Fair
Kayla, her mother, and her little brother go to the State Fair. Kayla has her tablet computer in her backpack.
Waylan finds them and whisks them to Zaradwin
Chapter 2: Discovering Your Dark Heritage
Day 1, Zaradwin
They arrive at a stone circle, where Waylan explains. First appearance of Macavinchy, messenger mouse, circle spirit. What happens to nail polish?
Chapter 3: Your First Steps on the Road to Power
Day 1, Zaradwin
They head for the castle. Waylan tells them about Zaradwin and sends message to castle. Trim?
Near evening, they find an injured person (Archie) at the edge of the Dark Forest. Mention of security system. Active rescue?
Chapter 4: Obliterating Your First Competitor
End Day 1, Zaradwin
Archie tells them his story and how he came to be injured. They spend the night. Mention of hair-color changes.
“Mention” in this is my personal code for “This is where I put X thing that I’m positive I’m going to want/need to be able to find quickly later on.”
Notice that this outline doesn’t spell out a lot – it’s meant to remind me of what’s where, not something intended to get an editor interested. Normally, nobody would see this but me, ever. (OK, I edited it a little to make it less spoiler-y, but the original is maybe three sentences longer than this one, and those chapters really were endless chat without even any tea…)
I could have labeled each scene in Chapters 1 and 3 – Scene 1, Day 1, State Fair; Scene 2, Day 1, Zaradwin, etc. – but for me, in this book, just making each scene a new paragraph is enough. This isn’t about filling out some proper format, it’s about organizing the structure of an existing manuscript, so I can find things that need changing or that are out of order, and figure out where to put any new bits that are needed.
As I go through boiling each chapter down to just the really key events, I notice things that I want to add or fix. Looking at this outline tells me that chapters 2, 3, and 4 are almost all talk – Waylan explaining things, the spirit making cryptic comments, Waylan explaining more things, Archie telling them things. OK, some of it is entertaining (hopefully) banter, but the only things they do are talk, walk all afternoon, bandage up an injured guy, and talk some more.
I note the places that need fixing (and any fixes I think of on the fly) in red. When I’m finished with the whole manuscript, I note the relevant things my beta-readers have mentioned (that would be the note in blue, above). Sometimes, I’ll print out the outline and scribble notes on it; sometimes I just do it on the computer.
By the end of the process, I can see fairly easily where I have timing problems – too much happening on one day, not enough time (or too much) between event X happening and event Y occurring as a result, inconsistent travel times (trip to castle is one day’s march here, but takes three days there), people mentioning something that happened “yesterday” when it was two days ago, etc. I also have some ideas for fixing at least a few of the problems, and when I go through the comments and editorial requests, I’ll be able to find key points more easily.
The key thing – and one of the hardest – is picking just the important bits to put in the outline. I do this by asking myself what would make the story fall apart if I left it out. Again, I’m not trying to make a summary that makes sense to anyone else; if I did that, each of those chapters would have two or three long paragraphs covering what Waylan explains, what they talk about, and what Archie tells them. For purposes of analyzing the timing and structure, I don’t need those details; knowing that here is where Waylan explains background is enough.
More than anything else, the term “messenger mouse” has me really intrigued.
I’m starting to do something of the sort with a half-finished novel. For reasons I don’t remember now, I have four different versions of Chapter 9, all with different material, and I need to find out what elements to put where, and if some of it needs to be the next Chapter 10.
Where you say “mention,” I say “plant.” 🙂
I outline as I write. I call it my Scene-by-Scene document, and it’s a living document, meaning I keep changing it as I do another draft and change things. I try to keep the description to one line if possible, no more than three. Since I break my book up between different files (I write in Word, and it gets tetchy if the document gets too long, so I break it up into twenty page chunks). Scene-byScene is basically a navigational aid, so I can find important things again. I also outline ahead a few scenes sometimes if I know what I’m going to write next, so I don’t forget important. And then if things change while I’m actually writing the scene, then I go back and change the Scene-byScene to match. I include which “chunk” file it’s in (Part1, Part 2, etc), timeline info, scene number, POV character if applicable, and the major/important event in that scene. It’s been very helpful.
I have done this sort of outline on occasion, mainly as an aid to writing a synopsis. “Mention” is also in my personal jargon, for very much the same reason.
For general writing & revising (to the extent that I revise), I think I must hold a lot more of this sort of stuff in my head than many authors. It seems to work for me (except for NaNo projects, where it breaks down almost completely, but then NaNo is a weird blip on the process radar in lots of ways).