Process #2 - Horizons to Strive for
“In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
Every story is a question that must be answered. It’s a descent into the unknown and then back into the known. It’s going down into the dark basement to change the lightbulbs. It’s a journey into death before being reborn. Stories are as natural as life and death, light and dark. There’s a reason why no matter the culture or who is telling it, stories generally have similar elements and structure. We could debate all day as to why that is, but the truth that telling a story comes naturally to us, is a truth that guides me in my writing process.
As you recall, our last newsletter was about process, specifically how I personally develop the initial ideas for a story until it starts to take shape. The next stage in my process, and likely most writers’ process, is the outlining stage. This is when you take the story idea and start to plot out the actual events of the story. We all remember the lessons we learned in school, the inciting incident, rising action, the climax, and falling action. For me, I write mostly in a three-act structure. I’ve experimented with four or five act structures before, but that was when I was doing more screenwriting than novel writing. For whatever reason, the three-act structure is easier for me when writing a novel.
Truthfully, the first time I started to really outline a story, I was overwhelmed. Do you know how long novels are? It depends on the genre, but generally at least 50,000 words. Less than that and you start getting into debates about labelling it a novella or short story. What was the longest essay you had to write in school, ten pages? A ten-page essay was a nightmare to me in school – and I was good at writing essays. But even outlining a ten-page essay so that it was coherent with a good flow of ideas made me want to pull my hair out. Well, ten pages is about 2500 words. So write twenty ten page essays and you’ll have a novel. That’s a lot, right?
And 50,000 words isn’t even that much. If you own my first Mariana book, it’s pretty thin compared to some novels you might have on your shelf, right? Well, I just checked and book one of Mariana is about 60,000 words. I don’t know, maybe this doesn’t overwhelm you, but when I first started writing, I was baffled about how I could turn a story idea into an actual novel if even just outlining one felt this daunting.
The nice thing is when you start at the basics and map everything out, things do start to take shape. Especially if you do what it takes and learn the basics of story structure, you start taking the different beats you do have outlined and you plug them into the story structure. If you look at something like Star Wars, and you have a beginning and an ending in mind, you plug those beats in and then start asking the questions you need to answer (see the last post) to fill in the rest. The beginning of Star Wars starts with a farm boy who is tired of farming. The ending of Star Wars has him radicalized and blowing up the evil empire’s space station and everyone in it. You then ask yourself, how does this happen? How does this story get from point A to point B? Well, what radicalizes a kid more than killing his family? What if you have an old guru who tells him he’s special and that he takes after his father he never knew, who was a great Jedi. What if on the journey to exploring this new information he meets a princess who needs his help? What if in his journey to rescue the princess a planet gets blown up and the empire is going to blow up another – the one you and your new friends are on?
Obviously, there’s a lot more to the story, but those are the broad strokes, and you can start to fill in the blanks. Especially once you start building out characters and allow them to make decisions in your story. What’s magical about outlining is that often the characters start to take control a bit. You’ll sometimes paint yourself into a corner in a story because you’ll find a character makes a decision that you’re honestly not sure how you’re going to have them deal with the consequences. But that’s part of the fun.
I know that I’m only painting broad strokes here, but these posts are about process, and truthfully, if you take the time to do the nitty gritty and trust in the process, your characters start to work things out. Obviously, you don’t want them to make all the decisions, because you’ll find they sometimes want to take the easy way out, or that sometimes you’ve started to care about the character so much that you don’t want them to go through something too difficult. But that doesn’t make for very compelling stories. I mean, look at Han Solo. He literally did take the easy way out at first, he took the money and got the hell out of the cross hairs of a planet destroying space station. Course, that made it all the more compelling when he showed up at the end and saved the day.
The last thing I’ll mention about my outlining process is that I generally like to write out a guiding principle that helps keep me in line during this fleshing out of the story. I call it my “horizon to strive for.” I often picture story telling as navigating a vast valley, walking towards the west edge of the horizon. The horizon that I strive for is an idea or a feeling that I try to keep in my mind as I outline and as I begin writing prose. Especially since outlining can mean getting caught in the nitty gritty of story, getting stuck in the weeds, struggling to just make it all make sense. But if I occasionally look up at the horizon and remember what I’m aiming for, it helps keep me on the right path. For book one of Mariana, the horizon I strove for was the idea that Mariana is always right, especially when adults are telling her otherwise. The doubt she’s made to feel is her journey into the unknown. She agonizes over the ideas adults are trying to tell her for her own good, because why shouldn’t she trust the adults in her life? But her challenging them is good for them and for her growth too.
The horizon doesn’t always need to be this profound idea either. For the Brother Paradox, the book I’m working on right now, the horizon I’m striving for is that the main character always chooses the chaotic route and it has to be funny. You could say for Star Wars that the horizon George Lucas strove for was that the story had to be fun and remind him of the old scifi serials he loved as a kid.
In the end, the final thing I’ll say is reiterating that outlining is daunting. It’s not my favorite thing in the world. Honestly, there are times when I truly hate the idea of outlining because of how unnatural it feels to plot out beat by beat, something as natural as storytelling. Some of you may not even need to outline, I’m sure there are authors out there who never do it. I’m not going to be the kind of writer who acts like there’s only one way to do this correctly and obviously it’s my way. No, you gotta do what makes sense for you.
But remember that a beautiful home always needs a blueprint. It’s the least glamorous part of building something, but I personally would rather regret the time making a blueprint I didn’t end up needing, than wishing I had a blueprint I didn’t have. Course, if you’re the kind of savant writer who doesn’t need one, then f*** off and go write your next great American novel, okay? This newsletter isn’t for you.
-Jacob