Now to the compound question all authors get asked more than any other: do you know the end of the story before you begin? Do you outline every step of the way before sitting down to write your tale? Depending on how you intend to work, your answer to that question may need to go into your book diary, or be handled directly in the manuscript itself. The choice is yours and depends very much on scale. If your outlines are going to be simple, then the word processor should do. In Word they’re very adequate. In a specialist program like Scrivener you have even more outlining tools, such as a corkboard and synopsis options.
If you plan to outline in great detail, then you could consider something more substantial. There are lots of ways to plan books if you want to go the complex route. I know people who use Excel spreadsheets, ‘brainstorming’ software, flow charts, posters on the wall, whiteboards. None of that works in my case. I’m a simple soul. I like practical solutions. If I wanted a detailed outline I’d write it directly into the book journal. OneNote is perfect for this kind of work. An outline looks like this:
You type your main headings normally – here Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Unplaced Scenes (more of the last one later). Then hit tab to create individual chapters. If you wanted to break this down further you simply tab again and create the hierarchy you want, typing in detail as you need it. It may look like plain text but it’s not. Hover over any of the lines and you get the little icon you see here. That means you can drag the contents anywhere outside the sequence and move it to a new position, bringing along any of the text or ‘children’ heading attached to it. In MacJournal you’d set up a folder called outline and place different posts in that, creating subsidiary folders for any hierarchies you want. Both applications offer a variety of approaches involving pages and folders depending on the complexity you need.
That, in essence, is outlining. You type a series of scenes, name them and give them some kind of description. Then you reorder these elements of your story and reprioritise them as you see fit.
How much advance planning should you do? There’s scarcely an event I attend where people don’t ask that. The honest truth is … every writer’s different. Most of us work in different ways with different books and rarely, if ever, ask ourselves these questions at all.
If you look on Youtube you’ll see a video from a few years ago about the group audio novel The Chopin Manuscript in which Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child and some of the other authors involved (this one included) talk about the project. Chopin was a strange kind of distanced relay race in which story chapters were handed over from one writer to another. Part of this video involved a three-way interview with Jeff, Lee and me and concerned our own working methods.
Jeffery Deaver is the most organised writer I know. As Jeff will tell anyone, outlining is central to his working method. He will spend up to eight months on a step-by-step structure of his story, detailed to a very fine degree, before he sits down and writes it (which made it all the more brave he took on something like the disorganised chaotic madness of Chopin). If you get the chance to hear Jeff talk take it. You will not, I guarantee, be disappointed. Whether you can produce a book the way he can is a different matter (I’ve tried and I know I can’t).
These are his working methods. Lee, in the same interview, made it clear that his are the absolute opposite. When he begins a new Jack Reacher book he’s no idea at all where it’s going. He sets up a beginning then lets Reacher walk off into the wilderness to see what happens. With a character like Jack Reacher, Lee knows – as does every one one of his millions of fans – it’s going to be something gripping.
As I said in the same interview I’m somewhere between the two, in the semi-structured land which is, I suspect, the native territory of most writers. I have some rough idea of the story – a beginning, some waypoints, a resolution. I really don’t know how it will get from one staging point to the next. I’m also acutely aware that the end I have in mind will undoubtedly be changed when I get there because the characters themselves will have demanded that.
I can’t work the way Jeff does because I have to discover the story through writing, not planning. I’m driven to carry on with the narrative because I want to know what’s going to happen, what surprises lie in store as the narrative emerges from the rough sketches and notes I have so far. So I use a fuzzy modus operandi to get from one waypoint to the next, always keeping my eye on the near and far horizon.
Here’s a very common scenario. You’re part way through the book and you come up with an idea for a scene. A great idea. One you don’t want to lose. But it’s not the next scene in the book. In fact you really don’t know where such a scene is going to fit at all. The only thing you do know is it sounds perfect for the story and could, at some stage, move the narrative along. Perhaps it’s even occurred to you that the scene has to happen in order to get to your planned conclusion.
Example … ‘Sally kisses Charlie.’
When? Don’t know.
All I understand is that at some point it simply must occur.
So what do you do? All too often you bury it in the project notes in the diary and, if you’re not careful, pick it up later, when that bright spark of inspiration appears too late to affect the book.
We need a better, easier solution. You can see it in the outline here: the Unplaced Scenes folder. This is a temporary home in your outline for those events you think are necessary but currently have no logical place in the narrative. Yes, you can – and perhaps should – make a note of them in your book diary. But a simple heading in your outline can be so much more effective than a note buried deep in a sea of other material. It’s there, visible every time you come back to the structure of your narrative, nagging you to pay attention to it.
Direction is essential. I need to have an idea where I’m headed even if I’ve no clear idea of how I get there. Somewhere along the way you’ll look at those unplaced scenes and think – OK, now I know where to go. Or … that’s just not needed. Either way you have a signpost. It’s always helpful to know what you want to write. But it’s equally useful sometimes understanding what you don’t want to.
Something quite subtle and important is happening here once you get the hang of outlining, even very loosely, outside the linear, sequential order which your book will one day take. Narratives consist of bridges between the ‘islands’ that make up the string of events in your story. If you keep those potential islands stored in that Unplaced Scenes folder, they will, when they bounce back into your head, prompt the construction of the bridge that makes them work. You’ve got something to write when you might otherwise be banging your head against the wall.
At least that’s the way this simple little trick works for me.