Category: outline

Running a bit late with this today.  Sorry.

So, I’m wading into a new book this month, and I figured… well, that’s probably a great time to talk about getting started and the draft process.

Of course, right off the bat… did I really start it this month?  I mean, sure, about two weeks ago I sat down and started actively working on an outline for it.  But the truth is, this is actually the second outline.  I first pitched it to my agent almost two years ago (and then again to my editor that summer).  They both said (and eventually, I agreed) that it needed some more work.

And, really, the bare idea came almost a year before that.  Back in early 2016, if memory serves.  I know I talked with another author, Kristi Charish, about one aspect of it back then, to get her thoughts and expertise on parts of it.

When do we “start” writing?  When does it count?  Is it when we first start thinking about a project?  When we actually make some notes or an outline?  Or is it not until I write VAMPIRE KAIJU: BOOK ONE by Peter Clines   CHAPTER ONE…?

I think that’s worth mentioning, because whenever I see someone talking about writing a book in five weeks or two months or whatever, I always wonder what they’re counting.  A finished, polished manuscript?  Just the first draft?  Are they counting the time they spent outlining, or that they started mulling it over months—maybe years—in advance?

Paradox Bound came out in 2017, but I pitched it to my editor and wrote up a first rough outline back in 2013.  And Dead Moon, my new one that just came out on Valentine’s Day?  My very first stab at that actually happened back in 2011, right after I finished writing Ex-Patriots.  Yeah, it was a different book back then, but still… when I sat down to “start” writing it in 2017, I already had about 30,000 words done.

So how long did they take to write…?

Again, just think about that the next time you see someone say they wrote something in a short amount of time.  Or in a very long amount of time.  We all have our own thoughts about what counts as starting and stopping points.

Anyway…

At the risk of sounding arrogant, let me walk you through my process.  Well, more of a quick stroll, really.  I’ve talked about a lot of this before (so I’ll add a lot of links), and I don’t want to bore you with it since… well, odds are you won’t be doing things this way.

No, seriously, you won’t.  The process I use is pretty much unique to me.  And the process you use is unique to you—even if maybe you haven’t figured it out yet.  Or you’re in the process of evolving from one process to another.  I’m just showing off mine to maybe spark some thoughts and help you think about such things.

So… let’s get started.

All of this always starts with an idea.  Maybe you’re the type who writes them down, maybe you keep it in your head for a while.  I’m 50-50 on it.  If an idea really sings in my head right at the start, in any sort of way, I always write it down.  But some I mull over for a while.  I let them ferment in my brain, see if they grow a little or get a better shape.

Eventually all these notes come together in some form of rough outline.  I think we all do some kind of outline.  Even the most random of road trips starts with, at the bare minimum, “let’s head west.”  Maybe it’s just a page or two of those rough notes.  Maybe it’s an extensive beat sheet.  It might be a huge stack of color-coded index cards.  This stage is really going to come down to “whatever works for you.”  The outline I just finished up for this project is twelve pages, with another two page document about the characters, but that’s just me.

And now, I guess, we’re ready to “start” writing.

My first drafts are big, messy things.  I write a lot, but I also skip a lot of things.  The only goal with a first draft is to get it done.  Nothing else matters.  Not punctuation, not spelling, not finding the exact right word or crafting the perfect cool line to end that chapter on.  These things’ll matter eventually, but right now… I just want to finish this draft.

NaNoWriMo is really all about this.  It’s pushing yourself to just focus on finishing a first draft, rather than slowing down to worry about individual scenes and chapters.  If you’re especially determined (or masochistic) you could try the 3 Day Novel contest.  My partner’s done it a few times now and… well, I just try to keep her supplied with coffee and stay out of her way.

Once I’ve got this done, I dive into my second draft.  This is me in clean-up mode.  All the stuff I skipped gets filled in.  Sentences I never finished, incomplete descriptions, the places where I had to look up a certain place or name and for now it’s just ######### or [ADD BIG FIGHT HERE] or [MAKE THIS NOT SUCK SO MUCH!!!]

I also take a good look at the things I skipped.  Why didn’t I write it earlier?  Could I not come up with anything to go between these two elements?  Was I just not interested in writing that bit? If I’m not interested in writing it, people probably aren’t going to be interested in reading it.  This might tighten things up right here.

For me. the goal with this draft is to end up with a solid, readable manuscript.  Someone should be able to go to page one to page 500 and never hit any weird gaps or confusing typos or anything else that immediately kills the flow.

Third draft is editing.  I go through the whole manuscript line by line.  I check all my spelling.  I look for repetition and redundancy.  I cut a lot of excess words here.  Thousands of words, usually.  This involves a bunch of passes, the last one to make sure all this random cutting and tweaking hasn’t created any new hiccups.

When I’m all done with this—which can take a week or so—I try to get it in front of a few people I trust.  My partner.  Old friends who’ve ended up in the storytelling line of work.  People who’ve heard me talk about it and people who don’t know a thing about it.  The important thing is they’re all going to give me honest thoughts and opinions.  Which may sting sometimes, but will be much more useful.

Once I have all these notes from folks, I start my fourth draft.  Now I’m going through all these copies one line at a time, taking notes of my own and implementing changes where they’re needed.  How many people liked this bit?  How many didn’t like that one?  Whoops, guess I missed a comma there.  Now, having been away from this for a month or so while other folks were reading it, that line’s really dumb, isn’t it? Did I actually think that was deep and clever at some point?

This takes at least a week. Often more.  I’m simultaneously reading three or four copies of the book line by line, getting everyone’s thoughts and takes on it.  Weighing their thoughts against my own and each others.  Sometimes it goes fast, other times… it’s really slow.

And this eventually, finally brings us to the fifth draft.  This is me going through the whole thing again to make sure those fourth draft edits didn’t leave anything hanging or tweak a key point.  Just a nice, slow read-through.

One thing I like to do at this point is switch the whole thing into another font.  If I’ve been writing in , I switch it all over to Courier New.  If you’ve been doing that Comic Sans thing, hey, you needed to switch anyway.  When I do this, it makes everything sit differently on the page.  The words look different.  And suddenly passages I’ve been glossing over (after going through this a dozen times) are fresh and new.

And at this point… I wrap it up.  I think it’s important to just say “done” and move on to new projects, or else you can get stuck in an endless trap of rewriting again and again.  After all these rewrites and edits, there’s not much else I can do.

So that’s my process, beginning to end, in a nutshell.

Hey, what do you want?  I just started a new book.  I’ve got work to do.

Speaking of which… next time, I’d like to talk to you a bit about that guy across the street who just said the weirdest thing to me.  See him right over… where did he go?

Until then… go write.

            (Hi, Doctor Nick!)

            I’d like to thank you all for your patience while I was off finishing that book.  I went through a brutal last week of work on it.  I decided to change the last five chapters and then still squeeze in another polish draft.  Because why not, right…?

            And I’m assuming you’ve all been patient.  For all I know this was the last straw and you all said screw it—Victoria Schwab just tosses out great writing advice on Twitter.  Why am I wasting time waiting for this guy to come back?
            I may just be writing into the internet void.

            Ah, well.  I’ll give it a few weeks to be sure.

            So, speaking of the void, a couple months back I talked about outlines, and how my attitude toward them has changed over the years.  And it is so weird to say “over the years.”  I’m still amazed I’ve been doing this for as long as I have.

            Anyway, I talked a bit about outlines and promised to revisit the topic because… well, this book I just finished was the first time I’ve done a book with a really full, complete outline.  The analogy I made was going from roughly planning out a trip to having an hour-by-hour itinerary.  And since my previous attempts to work with an outline hadn’t gone so well, I thought it would be worth talking about what I did and how it all worked out in the end.

            First off, as I mentioned before, the outline for this book was huge.  Forty-two single-spaced pages, almost double what I’ve ever done before with this kind of blueprint.  I had everything broken down by chapters, I had notes of which chapters were done from which points of view.  And I had another four page document that was just notes on characters—names, backgrounds, wardrobe.  I could probably say I had fifty pages of this done before I sat down to start actually writing it.

            Remember that last bit—we’ll come back to it.

            It’s also worth mentioning that I spent almost five weeks working on this outline.  More than a month.  There were many false starts.  There was feedback.  I pretty much went through drafts of my outline.
            Was it worth it?

            Well, taking the holidays and a week with a bad back into consideration, I finished up a first draft in just under nine weeks.  That’s pretty good for me.  My first drafts are usually somewhere between two to three months, so this one basically scraped right up against that, on the quicker side.
            But…

            It’s also worth noting that this was a much, much tighter first draft than I usually do.  I’ve joked about the number of notes I’d usually leave for myself in a first draft.  MAKE THIS SOUND COOLER or ADD A CHAPTER EXPLAINING THIS.  Usually, I’d have ten or twelve of these in a first draft.  This time around I had… four?  Maybe five?  And only two of them all that big.  So my second draft took just over a week, if memory serves.  About eight days, altogether.  In the past, that’s been a three to four week process, patching over all those holes.

            Now… let’s crunch some numbers.

            I’m sure one or two of you are seeing this as a brilliant validation of outlines.  They make things go so much faster and easier. Three months down to two?  Three weeks down to a little more than one?  Fantastic! I shaved 33% or more off my time.

            Did I though…?

            I mean, as I mentioned above, once I add in the five weeks of work for that outline, the overall work period is just about as long as it used to be.  It went much smoother, yes—much less head-banging-on-keyboard—but I’m almost tempted to say it took a little bit longer.  Not drastically longer, but I’m not sure it really saved any significant time in the long run.  I just used the time differently.

            Also worth mentioning—what’s that old chestnut, no plan survives contact with the enemy?  Same thing here.  No outline survives contact with the actual story.  As things are building and fleshing out, they change.  These are no longer those characters, able to carry out those actions.  One character in this book had a complete 180 personality change from first to second draft, from angry yelling guy to eerily calm smiling guy.  Which worked so much better for the story and made one of those fill-in-the-blank sections turn out completely different than I originally planned.

            That’s also why the ending changed, as I mentioned at the start.  I rewrote the last five chapters of the book.  The last seven, really, because once the characters were well-established and the pace was set… well, I came to some realizations.  One was that some of my ending was pointless conflict—just drama and action for the sake of drama and action, nothing else. Also, I had a much clearer view of how some characters would react, and those little tweaks changed how some things needed to happen.
            One other thing to keep in mind that I’d never considered—using a really dense, detailed outline can be a bit brutal if you’re someone who likes tracking their word count.  Every day I’d type out 1500-2000 words and feel really good about myself.  And then I’d delete all the notes for that chapter, which would knock the overall word count back by 500-750 words.  Yeah, I still wrote the same amount, but… well, if those numbers mean a lot to you, it can be kinda disheartening.

            What does all this boil down to?

            Well, not much.  As I’ve said in the past, an outline is a tool for my writing arsenal, but there’s no law that says I have to use that tool.  For me—someone writing on a hard deadline as part of my full-time job—yeah, I think I may try using this tool again.  For you, maybe not.  Maybe you’re still at a point where you can take the time to just feel your way through the story.  Maybe you just don’t want to deal with an outline and have that much planned out for you.  These are all fine things.  Like so many things on the writing side, it comes down to what works best for you.  That’s the Golden Rule I mention here so often.

            And those are my thoughts on outlines.

            At this point I’ll toss out the reminder that my latest book, Dead Moon, is currently available exclusively from Audible.com.  It’s set in the Threshold universe, so if that’s your thing you may like it.  You may like it anyway.  Please check it out, and if you already did reviews are always appreciated.

            Also, if you’re in the southern Californiaarea, this Sunday is the Writers Coffeehouse at Dark Delicacies in Burbank.  We’ll be there noonto three chatting about exposition and types of contracts.  As always, it’s 100% completely free (no fees, no dues, no sign-ups, no emails, nothing), and much like this blog, it’s kinda entertaining and semi-educational.  Feel free to stop by.
            Next time…

            Well, it’s been a while.  If anyone’s had a topic gnawing at them, please let me know in the comments.  Otherwise I’ll just babble on about spelling or superheroes or something.

            Until then… go write.

            Joyous Kwanzaato all of you celebrating it.  If you’re more the Christmas type, I hope the day was happy and peaceful and Santa got you that one thing that’s been on your mind.  And I hope all of you are looking forward to the upcoming New Year.

            Speaking of which… as this year’s winding down I thought it’d be worth going over what got done this year.  I’ve mentioned before, I think, that sometimes people get a really disheartening idea of how much some authors produce on a weekly/monthly/yearly basis because they’ll catch somebody like Chuck Wendig or Victoria Schwab posting about a particularly productive day they had (or Jonathan Maberry posting about, y’know, a day that ends in Y…).  When you’re struggling to squeeze in a few hours a week, it can be kinda soul-crushing to see people who are writing five or six thousand words a day.

            So I thought I’d go over all my writing-related activities for the year.  Break down what got done and how long it took.  Keeping in mind, again, that this is my full-time job, so there’s some stuff I consider part of the writing job that might not actually involve writing a specific book.  As we shall see.

            Anyway…
            I wrote—and rewrote—a good chunk of a book called Dead Moon.  I started it seven years ago and it’s finally coming out in February through Audible.  I think it’s a much better, stronger book than it would’ve been if I’d written it back in 2011.  Partly because I’m a better writer (I like to think so, anyway), partly because I’m gotten to work with a lot of good editors over those seven years and they each pushed me to be a little sharper, a little better.

            As you’re reading this, I’m a little over 45,000 words into another book, one that ties together two previous ones I wrote.  Overall, it’s going smoothly so far, although I’ve lost about a week to the flu which led right into the holidays, and also a pulled back early this fall.  I’d wanted to be another 20-25,000 words along at this point, but I’m still happy where things are at.  I’m probably going to do a whole post on this one sometime in the spring, because it’s the first time I’ve really done a book start to finish from a full outline.

            Plus I’ve been working on an outline for my next book, too.  Still in the early days, fleshing out a few things, but I’m very excited about it.
            I wrote about fifty-five posts here at the ranty blog.  Yeah, the number down on the side bar is a little higher, but a couple of those posts were cartoons or memes or different con schedules.  I’m not sure how many, but enough that I should probably knock at least a dozen off that final number.

            Probably worth mentioning that this year I shut down another blog I’d had for a few years. It was mostly about my geeky toy soldier hobby and ways to save money with it.  Truth is, though, I just haven’t had time to put into those paperhammer projects that I used to.  Closing it down took a lot of stress and guilt off my shoulders for… well, not coming up with content for that blog.  So that’s probably something to remember, too.  There are times it’s worth it to stopwriting.

            Also worth mentioning that this was a pretty appearance-heavy year for me.  I appeared at five different cons, if memory serves, plus a few speaking engagements.  Plus the Writers Coffeehouse, and now the Dystopian/Apocalyptic bookclub at The Last Bookstore.
            Finally, a ton of reading.  I didn’t get to read as much as I would’ve liked these past few years, so in 2018 I made it a point that I wanted to read a lot of novels from a variety of authors, and try to read at least one a week.  It was energizing and enlightening and I can’t recommend it enough.  Expand your horizons.  I’m currently in the middle of book 51 for the year, and might even get into 52 this weekend.

            (there was a pile of comics in there, too)

            And there’s that.  How this professional writer spent his time this year.  And keep in mind I still had time to binge Lost in Space, Sabrina, and 3Belowwhile also keeping up with my CW shows and The Good Place.

            Oh, and move to another city.

            Almost forgot that part.

            What have you gotten done this year, writing-wise?  Did you hit your goals?  Get close?  Hopefully, if nothing else, it gave you a good sense of where your goals should be.  Did you push yourself too hard, or not hard enough?
            There is no right or wrong answer here.  The right speed for you is going to depend on what you want to get out of this and where you’re hoping to go with it.  There’s no reason for me–or for you– to compare myself to anyone else. It just matters that I’m getting something done.

            Maybe think about that a bit as 2019 rolls closer.

            On which note, I’m going to try to get some work done before we lunge into 2019.  Hope the holiday shave been good to you and continue to be so.

            Next time, I’ll probably be giving my start of the year spiel.

            Until then… go write.    

            Oh, hey, it’s Thursday again. 

            A few weeks back I asked for possible topic ideas and somebody mentioned outlines.  It’s a good topic, and a good time for it since I’m early into a new book.

            Fair warning up front.  This whole post is very much going to follow the golden rule.  Outlining is an intensely personal process, and it changes from author to author and even from project to project.  Figuring out what works best for me (or you) might take four or five or twenty attempts.

            Hey, nobody said this was going to be quick and easy.

            Nobody who knew what they were talking about, anyway…

            Outlines are tricky things.  Depending on who you ask, they’re the most important part of the process or a complete waste of time.  They just need to be a few rough lines of notes or pages and pages of meticulously planned out beats.  They can make things incredibly restrictive or let me spit out pages without a moment of hesitation. 

            As I mentioned above, I think outlines are incredibly personal.  I’ve talked once or thrice before about how everyone has their own method when it comes to storytelling.  Maybe outlines are part of that method.  Maybe they’re not.
            A good analogy—one that’s going to come up a lot here—is travel plans.  There are lots of different ways to travel.  Some of them might make perfect sense to you.  Some of them might be terrifying.  Again, it’s all about what works for you.

            So let me blab about how outlines fit into my method a bit.

            Or how they’ve fit over time.

            First, there’s a pair of terms you may have heard before—plotters and pantsers. It’s (supposedly) the two big groups writers can get divided into.  Plotters are the folks who plan everything out in advance.  Pantsers make it up as they go along—by the seat of their pants.  Get it?  Hahaa, funny stuff. 

            This is pretty simplistic, though, and I’ve had a couple discussions with other writers about the problems with such basic classifications.

            I started out as a pantser.  I’d sit down at the keyboard and just type and type and type.  New characters, plot points, subplots… the book just went where it went, y’know.  This was how a lizard man from the center of the Earth ended up finding a crystal cave and wielding Excalibur.  Yes, that Excalibur.

            Granted, I hadn’t even hit puberty yet.  But even after I did, most of my attempts at writing were usually just me coming up with one clever idea, starting at a point that I knew would take me straight to that idea, and filling in the rest as I went along.

            And there’s nothing really wrong with that method.  It’s kinda like grabbing that special someone, throwing some clothes in a bag, and just going.  Pick a direction and drive.  Choose a flight at the airport.  Just go and see where you end up.

            I still remember when I made the next big leap in my sophomore year of college.  A lunch conversation with a woman I was dating sparked an idea for a story about an immortal wandering the world.  Which sparked the story of another immortal.  Which implied a third.  And suddenly I realized this would be the beginning of a really cool book.

            A week or so later, in the midst of writing all this down, it struck me that I had no idea what this book would actually be about.  I knew the characters, had cool origin stories for them, but past that… 

            So, for the first time, I sat down and figured out—in advance—more or less how this story was going to end.  I came up with a pretty solid idea what actions the heroes and villains would be taking on the final page.  Who was going to win.  Who was going to lose.  Even a clever denouement.  And I knew it was a denouement because I’d just learned that term a few weeks earlier.

            This is the slightly more planned trip, if we want to keep using that analogy.  Also in college, one of my best friends and I talked about driving cross-country after graduation.  We knew we wanted to end in California, but past that…  The rough plan was just grab clothes, maybe cameras, and go west.  Probably in her car, which was much more suited to a roadtrip than mine.  We knew eventually we’d hit Californiaand the Pacific and who knows what along the way.

            We never ended up going.

            Anyway… time passes.

            My next big outlining leap was kind of a bookkeeping thing.  I tended to scribble out five or six key plot points, but kept most of the story in my head.  Even with big, novel-sized projects.  When I decided I really wanted to start taking this seriously, one thing I started doing was writing everything down.  Every plot point, every idea, every snippet of action or page of dialogue.  When I finally sat down to write, I’d already have five or six pages of jumbled… stuff.  I might spend an afternoon putting it into a rough order and then—done.  Outline.

            If we want to stick with our road trip analogy, this is when we know we’re taking the southern route across the USon our way to Los Angeles.  We’re also going to be stopping in Gracelandand Roswell.  A pretty good idea of direction with a few markers along the way.

            Again, perfectly acceptable method.   Fine way to do things.  The first four books I sold (sold for actual money) were all written that way.  My book -14- had a little over eight pages of notes, and that included two and a half pages of character sketches. 

            It was right around this time that I ended up with Crown Publishing (a division of Random House) and became a writer with a contract.  I mean, I’d had contracts before, but this was the first time the contract came first.  Everything I’d done up until this point had essentially been on spec, me writing the book at whatever pace I wanted and then hammering out a deal afterwards. 

            What I was really dealing with now was a schedule.  A timetable of when things had to be done.  This wasn’t just about me anymore.  People had given me large advances based on the idea I could stick to these schedules.

            My first contract with Crown was rough.  Exciting, but rough.  I ignored a lot because holy crap I was a Random House author now!!! 

            My second contract…

            I’ve got to be honest, the second one was brutal.  I’m still kinda aching from it.  Aching in that “Maybe I shouldn’t’ve asked Conor McGregor if he wanted to step outside” way.  It was about two years of near-constant stress trying to get through three books, start to finish.

            And to be very clear—it wasn’t about them.  Despite what you may hear on some sites, the folks at Crown weren’t evil taskmasters or uncaring overlords or anything like that.  Hell, my editor gave me extra time whenever I even hinted at needing it.  he wanted the best book they could get.  Of course, extra time on book one meant I was getting into book two later, so I’d have less time for that…  But still, that was all me.  He was fantastic and accommodating pretty much every time an issue came up.  Everyone there was.  So don’t even think of using this as evidence of how “mean and demanding” traditional publishers can be.  It was absolutely, 100% nothing of the sort.
            No, all that stress was on me.  My ambling, feeling-things-out-as-I-go method of writing was fine when I could go at my own pace.  But now I was on a schedule.  Those spaces in the outline where I still needed to figure things out had to be a lot smaller, because I just didn’t have time for them.
            So—with some gentle prodding from my agent—I started doing larger outlines.  Now I actually figured out the majority of the story points and plot beats and character arcs in advance.  All the twists.  I had to have an ending—an entire ending—mapped out.
            If we want to fall back on travel plans, this is when you’re going past “plans” and into more of an itinerary.  Things are mapped out hour-to-hour now.  Most notably, when you’re done traveling.  I just had that trip to Texas last weekend and honestly… having a full itinerary set up for me was kind of comforting.  Of course, my mom tried doing a family trip like this for us when I was twelve and it was… well, a bit less than fun.

            My first couple outlines like this were just shy of twenty pages.  And really, that’s nothing.  The book I’m working on right now has a forty-two page outline.  I’ve got the next book about 2/3 plotted and it’s already close to thirty.

            Want to hear impressive?  Back when I was doing a lot of screenwriting interviews, I talked with  Tony Gilroy about his script for Duplicity.  He had, by his guess, a sixty page outline.  For what would eventually be a120-130 page screenplay.  He had the whole thing nailed down.
            And to be clear, this took time.  Lots of time.  It flexes different mental muscles to be examining the story in a much more clinical way.  And twice I had to junk half my work and start again.  A week or so of work—gone.

            I spent about three months last year working on a handful of outlines (one of which I may never do anything with, after all that hammering and rewriting)

            To be honest… I’m still not entirely sure I could say outlining saves time.  It may cut four or five weeks off the writing time, but if I spent four or five weeks working on the outline… well, it all just balances out, doesn’t it?

            I guess we’ll have to revisit this six or seven months from now.

            Again, please don’t take this as me saying you have to use this last method if you want to be a successful writer.  There are no such guarantees and  it’s all going to vary from person to person.  Like I just said, I’m still not 100% sure it’s going to help mebe  successful.  You may try a few of these versions before you figure out which one works for you.  Or you may find a different one altogether.

            So think about the path you want to take.

            Next time… I’d like to talk about why this is all happening.  To be more exact, why it’s all happening right now.

            Until then, go write.