Last week, I talked about getting my plot outline up to a sketchy 1200 words. Usually, my plot outlines start off fairly specific (“Kayla is in the library with Harkawn, reviewing past Dark Lord grimoires. She is annoyed – what good is summoning a horde of mosquitoes? A spell that repels them would be more useful. At this point, Del blows up something in the next room.”). Somewhere around the end of Page 2 or the middle of Page 3, they get more general (“Kayla gets a hint of Archmage’s True Plan – something about Macavinchy? – and also finds out that Florian has been reporting to him.”). By the end of Page 5, or around 1200-1500 words, the outline is extremely vague (“Kayla has big confrontation with Archmage. Kayla wins. Celebrations follow.”) If my current plot outline doesn’t follow that pattern, I keep fiddling with it until it does.
This 1200-word outline degenerated into vagueness near the bottom of Page One. Obviously, more fiddling was required. Fiddling with it involves making characters and intermediate events more specific and detailed, which ripples down toward the end. “Hero has big confrontation with villain” gradually turns into “Hero and small army face off with villain and big army,” which may (or may not) evolve further into “Villain’s army arrives at border. Hero & party work madly on super-spell; finish barely in time; use to defeat villain” or totally morph into “Hero has screaming argument w/villain during which sidekick sneaks up and brains villain with spare baseball bat” or even “Hero calls in villain’s mother, who shows up and grounds villain for making trouble.”
In this case, my biggest problem was the new characters – I didn’t even have a name for the Light Archmage. All I knew was that I did not want him to be a typical elderly wizard-mentor with a long white beard. My first bit of fiddling, therefore, was figuring out more about the Archmage – who he is, what is his backstory, what is his current agenda, how he would interpret the events of the first book and what his reaction would be. And since the last Final Battle Against The Dark Lord (#143, if you ask the Light side) was only ten years prior to the story-present-day, the Archmage would have participated … and might have known, or made deals with, some of the survivors. Which would explain the attitude some of my very minor characters from Book 1.
That helped enormously with nailing down more of the overall plot. I added “what happens offstage” to the outline: “Offstage, the Archmage hears the rumors about Kayla, and contacts Florian for information.” This explains the note a bit later in the outline that “Florian shows up at the castle for no apparent reason;” now I know that he’s there because he got that message from the Archmage three days before.
Next I looked at loose ends from the previous book – the character whose family kicked him out for being a Dark magician, the evil aunt, and so on. Since by then I had something resembling a story spine – rather wobbly, and still quite unsatisfactory as to the ending, but at least a mostly-logical progression – I could see where events related to the loose ends could drop into my plotline.
At this point, I started work on a timeline, similar to the one J. K. Rowling used, but putting events in chronological order by day/week instead of by chapter. Several incidents involve messages being sent over a distance, or characters traveling for more than a day. This shows me where I have gaps in my plotlines (where everyone is waiting for news to arrive at different locations, for instance) and where I need gaps in the plotline (where someone sends a message from a location three days away, and nothing more can happen in that subplot until the message arrives).
So I needed two things: a “travel-time map” to tell me how long it takes to get from all the key locations to all the other key locations, and a calendar to tell me what happens each day, both on and off-stage. Laying out the plot and subplots this way lets me see more possible links between one plotline and another – the castle steward’s complaints about income will dovetail nicely with the attempt to hire a spy network in a different plotline, and I can plug the gap in another by linking the present-day challenger to two different survivors from that ten-year-old Final Battle (one of them has a grudge, the other has a secret; both things will be handy and add drama to the main plotline, especially if the Archmage tries to use the drama for his own purposes).
By now I have 700 new words summarizing what various people have been doing offstage since the end of Book 1, and a lot more detail about events in the first half to two-thirds of the actual book. The timing of the opening has changed slightly to allow for travel time for various characters. The ending has gone from vague “There is a confrontation with the Archmage” to general “The armies of Dark and Light face off” to fairly specific “Kayla discovers the Archmage’s attempt to manipulate Glia, and blackmails him into leaving (no armies involved).” The details are still changing, and I fully expect them to go on changing as I write. The more details I add to the early and middle parts of the plot outline, the more possibilities I see and the clearer the path becomes. The outline is now around 3,000 words, and I’ll probably be able to start writing next week.
Obviously, all this is irrelevant to pantsers, and a lot of writers don’t bother doing maps and diagrams and grids and so on. I don’t get this elaborate with every story, but I find it very useful when I have a lot of moving parts to keep track of over time and distance.
I hear you about timelines laid out by day/week instead of chapter. (Although once or twice I’ve done 1 chapter = 1 day, including my current WIP.)
My current WIP doesn’t worry so much about travel time as about response time from bureaucracies and businesses. (“The character takes a formal exam for something. How quickly can one expect to get test results back?”)
I find maps and floorplans to be only modestly useful. What I did find useful in my WIP is a list of the rooms in the three Big Nice Houses, with descriptions.
Right now I’m in the middle of rearranging and replanning the plot, partly because I had certain events occurring too late (and possibly other events too early). But also partly because I needed to modify the stakes. “Protagonist is threatened with the loss of his fortune” was too thin and threatened to produce huge plot holes. “Protagonist is threatened with being cheated” is the new version, and I expect it to work much better with the ending of “Antagonists get what they want and find it a hollow victory.” (I’ve got more details, but they’re too long for a comment.)
OT/Administrivia: Will there be an Open Mic thread next week?
Yes, next week will be an Open Mic thread. Sorry about the confusion.
I was looking forward to reading this anyway, but this:
the Archmage would have participated … and might have known, or made deals with, some of the survivors.
…made me *really* want to read it. Yes, I am a total sucker for characters with History.
On a process level, I also found this interesting:
The more details I add to the early and middle parts of the plot outline, the more possibilities I see and the clearer the path becomes.
…because that sounds very similar to the way I come up with plot elements, except I have to fully write the earlier parts, not just outline them.
(“Just” outline… yeah, right, like that’s easy.)
Prequels, and multiple plot lines, complicate life so exquisitely.
I found the calendar of plot events very useful for my (currently, and possibly indefinitely, on the back burner) WIP. I’m on the pantser end of things, so I didn’t really use it to plot out events ahead of time, but wrote things down as they happened so I could keep track of how long it had been since X event or how much time the characters had to get ready for the big diplomatic visit coming up. I was also working with two POV characters in different locations, so the calendar let me track what was happening to each of them on a given day and how long their occasional letters to each other took to go back and forth.
I find maps useful for planning, but the one time I tried a calendar, it confused me more. I think that’s a revision step for me, rather than a planning step. Fortunately, all the events in my current WIP work out conveniently in a week-by-week rhythm (and all the characters stay in a limited area) that I can easily keep straight.
Well, I *need* a calendar for my WIP. It’s set on and around the minor planet 4 Vesta, which has a rotation period of (approximately) 3.5 hours. (Approximated because I have to calculate when the sun is up and when it’s down and Jupiter is up, and arithmetic was never my thing.
Indoors, people mostly use Standard (=Earth} time. But if anybody has to go outside, I have to know what kind of lighting they’ve got.
And at this point I have to go back several Standard days and catch up with what “time” it is outside. I have incautiously permitted my villain to set a 50-Standard-day deadline: pay large sums of money or be blown up. (He’s already done this once before.)
So in addition to figuring out what the hero’s doing meanwhile, I need to figure out what time of day the denouement till be. It’s going to matter.
Oops, my memory betrayed me. Vesta’s rotational period is 5.342 hours. So I had to round up to get an arithmetically manageable light/dark cycle. Not entirely accurate, but close enough for jazz. Did I mention that this is a space opera?
In the original Klingon?
Nope, no Klingon. I have no idea what the “Standard” they speak actually sounds like, after an estimated thousand years with not a whole lot of history, but it’s all translated into 21st century English. Many of the people on Vesta speak a tonal language that I call PidgAsian, but is more a creole than a pidgin. It contains a couple of recognizable Chinese words (because I googled for them), like Mingyi (senior physician) and Shu (rat). There’s also bot language, which is all beeps and whistles, and which I render [translated between square brackets.]