Welcome back Grinders. How did your exercise on writing goals versus your writing ambitions help you? Did you find a way to become more specific with your goals and to clarify your ultimate ambition?
It has been a couple of posts since I have reminded everyone that NaNoWriMo is three weeks away. If you haven't taken advantage of this break before the fury of writing, then I strongly urge you to spend some time prepping your novel. It will save you hours and headaches later when it really counts and your 50K word goal is on the line. Today I am going to show you how a basic outline can be the difference maker in the middle of your project.
Many authors I talk to are strict about not outlining their stories, we've talked about it in a previous post, but it is worth bringing up again. I think this is especially important for people who are setting out to write their first novel. I can make all of the difference when you are trying to blaze through words between work and dinner, and dinner and bed. You will find it harder then you think to find time to write so it will be up to you to make the most if it. If you could why not just write faster?
The idea I want to introduce has many names, and some different approaches, but it is one of the best outlining systems I have found yet. I have heard it called: plot points, story beats, story bullets, headlines, summaries etc. Whatever name you have heard it called it remains a valuable tool to dramatically increasing your writing.
I want you to take out a piece of paper or open up a blank word document and start thinking about a scene, chapter or short story that you are thinking about writing. Now you are going to take that scene and make a list of bullet points or story beats that will give you a rough guide of your goals to writing this story. I am going to take an earlier version of my upcoming NaNo'14 story beats and show you my approach. It is a sci-fi novel set initially about 40 years from now where we meet a woman named Cora who is training in a program, the training regimen is brutal and she doesn't know what the goal of the program is. In the initial scene I have a lot I need to accomplish. I need to: create a story hook, introduce the MC Cora, give the reader detail that this story in the future, create some sense of action and suspense, and lead into the next chapter.
Please keep in mind a few keys to this abridged form of outlining: you can always change it, it doesn't need to be in an kind of real order, and it can be a few words to several paragraphs for each beat if that is what works for you. One of the best things about this approach is that you can tweak it to suit your needs, timeline, and your writing style. On to the example.
-Meet Cora Preston (refer to character sheet) she is in a training facility with a dozen or so other people who are in the training program.
-Meet Jonathan Braddock (character sheet) who is the instructor of this group of trainees. He is a tough retired army colonel who immediately gets the action going.
-He chooses Tabias Engle (no character sheet) and Cora Preston to spar in the middle of the room in front of the group of trainees.
-Cora and Tabias have a fierce bout with each other, Cora is out matched in size and strength and has to find a creative and deceptive way to win the fight and avoid getting injured. This will show some of her character traits: toughness, resourcefulness, determination.
-After Cora pulls off an upset much to everyone's surprise. Braddock then challenges Cora himself and quickly thrashes her. In a moment where she thinks she may win even though she is on the ground, she kicks to try and trip Braddock who thinks he has made his point, she breaks her tibia on his leg not knowing that it is a bionic leg. Establishes the sci-fi element.
-Cora is in a great deal of pain and is taken to the infirmary for treatment. Where we will later meet her mother Helen.
-Braddock dismisses the class and leaves the training floor and speaks with Elliot Kimco (character sheet), where Kimco asks Braddock what he thinks of the recruits and their potential. Braddock says that he is the most impressed by Cora but Kimco is unconvinced after the most recent display.
-Kimco reinforces the hook that only 4 of the final 12 participants will move on after this week, a group that had once been 100s of trainees. He then tells Braddock that this group is too important to fail and that Braddock had better find the right group. Use this conversation to detail the wider scope of the story arc.
In my example I have spent time writing 8 bullet points of information, of varying length and detail, which will help me in writing my scene. This took less than 10 minutes worth of time, which may seem like a great deal of time spent not adding to your word count, but I guarantee it will save you time in writing the scene. This will help keep you focused on your goal of the scene, you will be less likely to forget introducing an important piece to the reader that will be needed in a later scene, and it will help keep you laser focused on getting the story moving and you will be less likely to get off topic and write yourself into a corner that will only cost you more time getting out of.
In the end it may save you 3 or 4 times the amount of time it took to write when you come to the editing in December and beyond. If you remember to save the story beats and attach them to the chapter as your write, it will be easy for you to use them later as a reference guide.
The challenge today Grinders is to see how much this benefits you. Try writing a scene without using the above outlining technique. It doesn't need to be long a few hundred to a couple thousand. And then write a different scene and start by coming up with 3 or 12 story beats, or more if needed, and then write the scene. Make sure you time both of these exercises just like I suggested in a previous post on gauging your writing efficiency.
Post your results in the comments for everyone to read. Did you find that the outline helped you speed up? Or did the extra time you spent detailing the outline have the opposite effect?
Let's get back to the grind.
No comments:
Post a Comment