The Twelve Part Outline, Part III

The third part of the twelve part outline, following Establishment and Incitement, is Challenge. I define this section as "minor antagonists are put into play". The protagonists aren't going to face the Big Bad, not yet. They may not even know there IS a big bad. But whatever path the protagonist is on, thanks to the Incitement, leads them to some trouble. More or less, what I've done is introduce the protagonist, and prod him to action, and now we see what problems they have because of that.

Now, this can take a lot of forms. In Thorn of Dentonhill, it's mostly physical-- Veranix pursuing the drug dealers cracking down on them. In Holver Alley Crew, it's more cerebral-- planning the first robbery they are going to do together. For Maradaine Constabulary, it's a bit of both-- Katrine and Minox trying to question people who have no intention of cooperating with the constabulary inspectors.

For some examples you might be more familiar with, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, this is Indy going to Tibet to get the amulet from Marion. Or in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy and Elsa in Venice, searching for the Knight's tomb.

In the grand scheme of things, this is still the small potatoes, though to the protagonists, and even the minor antagonists, it may not seem like it. It can be life or death for them. They just don't know how bad things can get. Yet.

Some inspirational pic-links

Sometimes I just like to surf online artwork to inspire ideas. I'm not saying these WILL inspire ideas I'll use... but I definitely like them.

Starships approaching planet.

Space Opera battle-- three ships in free-for-all

Steampunk Fascist Bunnies Launching World Domination

Infested with Brain Buzzes

My brain is always buzzing with ideas. Else I wouldn’t be a writer, and there wouldn’t be much point to this whole thing, would there?

But sometimes, even when I need to be focusing my creative energy on something specific (in the case of here and now, working on Maradaine Constabulary), the Brain Buzzes go crazy and it’s nigh impossible to work on what I should. Until I spend a little bit of time cultivating the New Idea, it’s not going to leave me alone.

Usually cultivation involves a bit of worldbuilding, character creation or outlining. I do some notes, and that’s usually enough to quiet my brain, set those ideas in the back of my head to ferment into something more cohesive, and get back to work.

This week, though, there’s been a LOT of Brain Buzzing.

• A new idea I’ll just call The Heroine Project for now. It’s little more than a vague idea.
• Reworking the history of Banshee-verse to expand the exploration of our solar system. I blame watching Defying Gravity for this one.
• Finishing the scripts for Triple Cross.

So I’ll be working on those things, hopefully that will quiet the buzzing.

Wrting Environments

The environment I write in is a crucial factor to how effective any given writing session can be. For one, I do better when in a public place, like a bookstore or cafe. Having a (habitually refilled) coffee or tea also helps a lot.

But there's more to the environmental factors. I need music, preferably by headset, to quit the rest of the world and occupy the parts of my brain that don't help when I'm writing.

Also important is being able to achieve a state of relaxed creativity. It takes a bit of time to get into the groove. One of my biggest problems is I need a good two-three hours to really get good work done. The first hour is usually something of a wash. I'm still working on how to make that first hour as good as the second and third.

But most of all, I need to be able to think. January is a bad time for that, because of seasonal allergies in this town. Cedar fever kills my brain in a sinus fog. Allergy medicine leaves me a functional zombie-- I can do most things, save write. It's very frustrating.

Thus you note the dearth of posts I made in January. Fiction writing was similarly held back. I've made some progress on the second draft of Holver Alley Crew (namely transcribing notes from my paper copy to electronic form), and inched forward with Maradaine Constabulary. That one, I can tell when the rough draft is done, it's going to be a rough draft.

Outlines and the Graveyard

I think it goes without saying that every writer has a graveyard; the place where dead projects are left to molder. The ecologist in me believes the ideas found in those dead projects break down and filter back up, get a chance to be used again.

For me, my graveyard is mostly filled with proof of the necessity of outlining. Several projects that were mostly borne of a single idea, and I immediately went putting pen to paper, figuring it would all come together as I wrote.

That was not what happened, of course.

My thoughts today went back to one of those graveyard projects, from over 15 years ago. Not to the point where I would revive it-- I really don't see that happening-- but just reminiscing. This one really was a Big Idea kind of project.

The Big Idea was this: What if five men, all born on Earth in the 1970s, were destined to be at a specific event on a distant planet in 3184? To all be there at the right time and place, they would have to use extraordinary means. I decided that each journey would have to be different.

One of them would become a test astronaut, doing the distance and time in cryo-sleep. One of them would learn magic, and fling himself directly through time and space to the appointed meeting. One would die and be resurrected when the moment came. Those three had the "short path", as it were.

The other two guys had the "long path". Or, one long and one indirect. One of them (Jake) essentially became immortal through little more than an act of will, deciding to live long enough to still be alive centuries later. The other (Ian) received a map of time/space portals, allowing him to travel all around time and space, making sure various pieces were in place for the event to occur (including sending the map to himself). These two, inevitably, became my more central characters of the five, as they had to deal with the intervening moments that led up to the Big Event, while the other three guys got to skip over them all.

The thing is, all of this is a whole lot of Big Idea, but not a whole lot of actual story. A big part of that comes down to not having any outline. Mostly what got written was a few vignettes where Ian would emerge through a portal, usually somewhere near Jake, and depending on where each of them was on their personal timeline, one of them would Know What Needs To Happen, and the other would be clueless and confused. None of these vignettes really amounted to much of anything, mostly because whichever character was more in the know would inevitably pull the "You Can't Know That Yet" card, in a lame attempt on my part to build mystery. This was in no small part to the fact that I honestly had NO IDEA where I was going with anything. Especially the Big Event. What the hell could it be, and why did it need these five guys there? No clue. I never came up with anything that I didn't immediately decide was either anticlimactic, contradictory or just plain stupid.

So, my point is, in the end, I need that outline. Especially if I set up something leading to a big climax.

Though, at some point, I might want to revisit some of these ideas. At the very least, there is something intriguing that could be done with the out-of-order friendship of an immortal and a time-traveller.

The Twelve Part Outline, Part II

This series on the structure of my Twelve Part Outline will not, in all likelihood, track with my writing progress on Maradaine Constabulary, if for no other reason than the simple fact that it's a lot faster to write about each stage of the outline plan than it is to actually write each stage. On top of that, there is the way in which I write, which having a structured outline allows me to do. I will on occasion jump ahead of myself-- write that Exciting Bit that I know will be happening later, and then go back and fill in that connective tissue to make the whole thing a cohesive whole.

Anyway, Part II: Incitement. This is where the actual plot gets rolling. Establishment puts the pieces into play, it sets up the go-cart at the top of the hill. Incitement is pushing it down the hill and seeing what happens.

What it comes down to is, whatever comfortable status quo the characters were in at the Establishment now needs to be changed, to get things moving, to prod them into action. So something has to happen, some new information has to present itself, or some other thing is imposed upon them. In Maradaine Constabulary, having established my characters as Inspectors and partners, Incitement is a pretty easy thing: give them a murder to solve. And since this is a fantasy world, and just to make it a little more interesting, the dead body was a mage.

The Twelve Part Outline, Part I

I've reached a word count of 5554 with Maradaine Constabulary: The Mage Murders, which also puts me quite cleanly at the end of the first part of my twelve-part outline structure: Establishment.

I prefer the word Establishment over, say, Introduction, although introduction is a key element. But in my mind, this first section of the book is about not only letting the reader know the main characters, who they are and what they are up to, but about getting a firm toehold into what the world is about. This is the foundation upon which the rest of the book is built.

Here we've got my main two characters, Katrine and Minox, with Katrine as the POV character, where she establishes herself in her new situation (see, there's that word) that sets the stage for what she's doing now. When I first drafted the outline for this book, I came up with the idea that Katrine had a big secret, and it would come out at part seven of the outline (Collapse). But there was no reasonable way to have Katrine's POV and dance around said secret, I realized. The secret, in and of itself, could not be the bomb that gets dropped. So I put it right in the beginning. Right in the very first sentence:

Katrine Casey walked to the Inemar Bank Constabulary House carrying a lie.

The over the course of the Establishment, we have her meet Minox, and get a grasp who he is, t least through her eyes. We also meet four other secondary characters, whose roles, I will admit, are not entirely fleshed out in the existing outline. That is part of the discovery of writing. The process of outlining never takes that away.

Anyhow, I've found that for the Establishment, around 5000-6000 words is a good zone, especially with a target length of 80-90K. It's also, for me, one of the harder parts to write, because it's part of the mental process of getting into the world and the characters. Once I've established that in my head, the rest becomes clearer.