Bleeding Ladies Biker Gang

Everyone has different writing methods, and everyone has different revision methods. That said, you never know what you might be missing out unless you at least try a different way of doing things. You might find you really like it.

That was the case when it comes to revision drafts for me. I used to “save as” my file with a new draft number, then go through and make changes to that document. Typically, this only included line edits and the occasional paragraph rewrite. For me, it worked fine—I thought my first draft of this particular story was pretty great and only needed a few tweaks.

Boy, was I wrong.

I tried my friend’s method. I can’t remember why I decided to try it, but I went for it. Here’s how it goes:

Wait a month (or longer) after finishing your first draft. This is a great time to collect feedback, make a list of change intensions or potential problems, and let your thoughts on the story simmer.

Open your draft.

Open a completely blank document.

Put the two side by side and literally rewrite it from scratch.

After one or two rewrites (depending on how much you need it), THEN you can go into line-editing combs drafts.

It’s daunting, honestly. And it takes a lot of time. Rewriting 50k+ words? Besides, I thought it would end up mostly a word-for-word retyping. Wrong again. Even though I was pretty happy with my original draft (which had gone through 5 combing “drafts” of line-edits already), as I got further into the draft, I started changing more and more. And honestly, I’m so much happier with this new rewritten draft.

Reasons I think rewriting from scratch is effective:

If it’s not worth writing a second time, then how much is it actually worth?

You’ll find a lot to cut for a leaner, tighter story.

It’ll free your mind to experiment with new scenes/methods/timelines.

You’ll find plot holes and have an easier time finding spots to fix them.

If you get stuck rewriting a scene, you’ll know it’s a problem scene and it probably needed rewriting anyway.

This is going to be my method from now on! Even though it’s exhausting and not as quick and easy as the smaller edits I was doing. But the result is definitely worth it.

Okay. So I put this off for a while because I knew it was going to turn into an overly long and detailed post, but I had some time today and we’ve already talked about outlines a bit, so here you go:

Advice for Aspiring Authors: Outlining

Why You Need to Do It: Plotting and outlining are how you give your story a good narrative arc. If you don’t start writing with a pretty clear idea of your story’s beginning, middle, and end, you have absolutely no means of controlling the pace, and pacing is really important. You also have no way of knowing what kind of circumstances you’re going to need for your denouement and ergo have no way of ‘setting the scene,’ as it were. It’s like trying to put on a play with no props or costumes and actors who don’t know what parts they’re playing and who are saying their lines for the first time in front of an audience. Improv is fun but writing is not the place for it. 

A lot of people who don’t like to outline think that outlining stifles creativity and adhere to the very romantic notion that you should be able to just sit down and let the words flow. But an outline doesn’t give you every sentence and every word–an outline just gives you the basic idea of what has to happen in a given scene to move the story forward. So outlining actually allows you to exercise two different kinds of creativity: finding the structure of a good story, and then putting that story down in words. If you do it right, outlining can actually be really fun. 

But this is the tricky part. How do you do it right? There are a million different methods of outlining and different ones work for different people. I’ve made you a list of different methods, in case you have no idea at all where to start:

The Linear Outline. This is exactly what is sounds like. You record the events of your novel in sequence. You can use butcher paper, an online organizational tool like LitLift, or even just bullets in a Word document.  If you like writing your scenes in the order they’ll appear in the story, this is probably a good way to do your outlining.

The Snowflake Method. If you only have a very basic idea of your plot, this is a good way to go. The Snowflake Method takes a simple plot and then exponentially increases the detail until your story blossoms like a Blooming Onion. It’s like a story fractal. However, other people can explain it a lot better than I can, so here’s a link.

Mindmapping. Picture Sherlock Holmes in his Mind Palace. Mindmapping is the practice of starting with one idea (usually on paper, though you can do this online with iMindMap), and connecting it to anything else that you think you might need for your story. You’re not going to get a linear summary of your plot this way, but it will help you flesh out and connect ideas, and have them all in one place.

The Tetris Method. There are a million different names for this one, this is just the one I made up. The Tetris Method involves recording scenes and information on note cards or Post-its–which you can also do electronically with CeltX or Final Draft. This gives you the option to create a linear timeline, and then shuffle all the events around as the need arises. 

The ‘Fifteen Events’ Method. List the numbers 1-15 down the side of your page. On Line 1, give a one sentence description of how the novel begins. On Line 15, give a one sentence description of how the novel ends.Then go to Line 2, and describe what happens next after the beginning.Then go to Line 14, and describe what happens just before the end. Go back and forth from beginning to end until all fifteen lines are filled in.This exercise forces you to figure out how one event leads to another, and if you might be missing one of the key steps that will help you get from number one to number fifteen.

The Rule of Six. The Rule of Six says that for each apparent phenomenon, you should devise at least six plausible explanations. And it occurred to me that this can be applied as a writing theory–and there are two different ways to use the Rule of Six in the outlining process: Find six different explanations for any event or action that occurs in your novel which doesn’t have significant explanation or motivation, or come up with six different ‘what happens next’ scenarios when you get stuck.

Seven-Point Story Structure. This is a very specific method of modeling a story but it may provide a great jumping off point even if it doesn’t fit your needs exactly. See a more thorough explanation here.

The Question Method. This is one of my own invention. Here’s how it works: (1) Have an idea. The most basic concept of a character and a story. (2) Start asking questions. Questions the reader is going to ask/need the answers to. The biggest (and most important ones) are going to revolve around motivation and obstacles. Why is the MC doing what he does? (3) Answer the ones you can answer and move on. (It’s okay to leave gaps in your outline–you just need more bricks than holes if your wall, if you know what I mean). (4) Ask more questions. Once your story starts to take shape you can ask more–and more specific–questions. Lather, rinse, repeat. All you have to do is keep repeating steps two and three over and over again. Eventually you’ll get down into the minute details and have a pretty solid outline to work with.

Personally I use some combination of the the linear method, the Tetris method, and the question method. And eventually what I end up with is a rainbow-colored outline that looks something like this:

Of course, this isn’t going to work for everyone. But I find it’s really helpful to have scenes organized in such a way that I can easily move them around until they’re in a kind of order that make sense (this is a finished outline so they’re color-coded by chapter). And there’s very little on each card–I give myself a scene title and the setting and a one- or two-sentence description of what has to happen in the scene. I find this actually lets me be more creative rather than less, because it gives me the option to write freely without worrying about if the scene is taking me in the right direction. When you know what has to happen, all you have to worry about is the words. 

Each week, a new author will serve as your Camp Counselor, answering your writing questions. Marivi Soliven, our second counselor, has taught writing workshops at the University of California, San Diego and at the University of the Philippines. Her most recent novel, The Mango Bride, is about two Filipina women, and the unexpected collision that reveals a life changing secret:

How can you be sure that your plot is actually compelling, and not just a pile of stuff that happens? — The Freelancer Society

Novelist Drusilla Campbell answers this question by comparing a novel and its parts to weaving cloth on a loom. Imagine your plot is a red weft—the thread that runs crosswise through that cloth. The events are all the vertical threads, called the warp, that your weft runs across. A compelling plot is a weft that intersects all the warps from one end of that cloth to the other: from the inciting incident that gets your novel on its way, to the many detours and adventures your protagonists take, all the way to the very last scene.  

If you build your plot correctly so that characters are reacting to events, even surprising scenes become logical.

At the end of the novel, you should be able to tug on that red thread and see each of the preceding scenes “pull” along with it. If that happens, chances are you’ve composed a compelling plot. If you pull and nothing happens, you’ll probably need to tighten or delete the irrelevant scenes. 

Additionally, I like to construct an “internal logic” which defines the way your imagined world functions. Your characters move according to the  rules you create so that their actions become logical or plausible to someone reading your story. When your story’s internal logic is strong, it enables readers to suspend their belief and go along for the ride, because what happens makes sense. Thus Bram Stoker’s vampire perishes in the sunlight, because that’s how his novel’s internal logic works. On the other hand, according to Stephanie Meyer’s internal logic, it makes it possible for her Twilight vampires to survive in the watery sunlight of the Pacific Northwest.

Next week’s Camp Counselor will be Patricia C. Wrede, author of fantasy novels such as the The Enchanted Forest Chronicles.

Julia Crouch’s second NaNo-novel Cuckoo landed her a three-book deal. She spends her days writing at an untidy desk in a shed at the bottom of her garden in Brighton, with occasional changes of scene.

Sarah Duncan (right) has written five novels, the most recent being Kissing Mr. Wrong (shortlisted for the RNA Novel of the Year 2011). She has also taught creative writing at the Universities of Oxford and Bristol.

Do you find planning or pantsing (writing by the seat of your pants) more effective when it comes to writing? — Anonymous

Julia: Definitely pantsing. I planned Wrecked, the novel I am currently working on, and, while I have a lot less story editing to do now that I have finished draft zero (the draft no one but me sees), I really, really missed the spirit of discovery of the pantsing approach.

What do you do when something makes its way into the story completely by accident and then changes the entire novel? —ErinKenobi2893

Sarah: Shout yippee and hallelujah, then run with it. I don’t plan much beyond a few key plot turns, so something pitching up out of the blue is what I hope for! In my opinion, this is the best bit about writing a novel, and shows you have a fully functioning subconscious imagination.  The only time I’ve plotted in full, I was bored to tears with the story when I came to write it so tootled off and wrote something completely different.

Next week’s head counselor will be Ari Marmell, fantasy author of the Widdershins novels and campaign writer for role-playing games including Dungeons and Dragons.