I had this brilliant idea for handling my ancient foe, outlining. Genius, really. Trials runs have shown it to be super effective. Thank goodness google is there to show me that it has names and is already thought up, even if I never came across it before.
Most discussion on plotting or outlining go one of two ways. Either you should pull out your index cards, make a huge mess with them, and then stuff them all together and voila, your randomly generated cards are the Tarot deck of your novel. Alternatively, a class favorite is also to pull out a legal pad of paper, and with the same gusto you tackled this in middle school, start number 1., 2., 3., etc., with points and subpoints until your end result is a nice table of numbers (and if you’re fancy, letters too).
If neither of those float your fancy (they don’t mine), you might want to try the new spangled super fantastic Mikey way (which said Mikey is still playing with and seeing if it holds out, but that’s just minutia). This actually kept me up way past my bedtime last night, resulting in decreased beauty rest and increased annoyance from my clan of trolls this morning as I was even later and gruntier(*) than normal. Tools needed will be paper, instrument(s) of writing, and your brain.
OK, if you’re still with me, then chances are good you’re in the same boat I am. You’ve got this novel in your head (and it has a hold on your heart – awwww, that’s sweet). You know from the depths of your creative soul that events X, Y, and Z are going to happen. You may even have a loose 40,000 words already written. But that’s all you’ve got. So the first step, then, is to get all of that out in a not-quite linear fashion (oh, that joke will make you laugh in a second…if you’re a math geek).
On your piece of paper, draw an arc (that’s a half circle). You will be doing this a lot, so don’t worry about how pretty it is, that’s why A) we shouldn’t cover the whole paper in our pretty hemisphere and B) we will end up using a lot of paper. At the bottom left of the hemisphere, right the name of a main character. This is their arc. About half way through the arc, make a notch, and beside it write what the turning point is in their story. At the far end of the arc, write a note about their conclusion. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this – make additional notches moving towards the midpoint and away from it, filling in the other events and discoveries that pepper their tale.
Now draw another arc for your next character, rinse, wash, and repeat. Don’t limit yourself to just your main character(s). In fact, you don’t even need to limit yourself to the characters in your story. Maybe your story has some object everyone’s after – make an arc for it and plot where it is through the story. If your story covers a wide stretch fo time, make one for the seasons that pass, milestone dates, whatever.
Now this is why I’m going to need a whiteboard (or some freaking huge graph paper). So far, you’ve made a lot of marks. Hopefully, you found yourself generating some unrealized points like “hey, she shouldn’t drive that car off a cliff before the midpoint because she doesn’t get gas money until the second to last scene!”, etc.
You could stop here – this is actually as far as I’ve gotten. But it strikes me, the next obvious step is to meld all of this together. Some things may get lost. New points may be found. That’s ok. This is a creative process, not tenth grade trig. I don’t think it should be melted together into one line – save that for when you codify this as an outline. This is the transition step, where you take all of the hemispheres and overlay them on each other. Some of your half spheres will end up being more like stock market charts with peaks and such. This is also probably the most challenging stage, because what you are doing is visually making sense of your story.
My vision is to end up with a giant graph of the novel, from beginning to end, and to be able to point to any part of the novel and see at a glance who and what should be in a chapter/scene together. This doesn’t have to contain the minute details – that’s what writing is for – but it would help give a visual sense to the story. Which is really all I want.
Hope this idea helps someone else too! I know, its kind of like a storyboard, but that isn’t a bad thing either.
[ In poking around, I found this article that identifies these graphs as Freytag’s pyramids. Abusing them to map out characters and events and then overlaying them all together just seems like a natural next step to me, and since in the end I wasn’t the original thinker that invented them, I’m sure someone has already invented the overlay and has a pretty name for it and everything too. ]
* gruntier (verb) – To emit grunts as substitution for speech, discussion, or general pleasantries.