Outlining
Posted under: NaNo2010
You may have noticed a gap in the NaNo2010 posts here.
The problem is that it’s time to do outlining again. Outlining is fun, I like outlining.
Unfortunately, I am finding myself dissatisfied with the outlining tools I can find. Paper and pen is the closest I can come to what I want, but the end result is sloppy and disjointed.
And sloppy and disjointed isn’t fun. And since it’s not fun, I don’t want to do it.
The Way I Outline
I don’t know if my outlining method is normal. I DO know that there’s no way I can just start at the beginning of the book and outline my way through to the end, chapter by chapter. My brain doesn’t think that way.
Instead, it’s like my brain constructs scenes as points along a line, then goes back and fills in the gaps between the points.
Every new scene happens BEFORE or AFTER another scene.
Instead of :
- A phone call from an anonymous, muffled voice wakes Jimmy up, telling him the cops are headed to his house, and if he doesn’t want them to find the dead body in the basement, he’d better start running.
- Jimmy panics. He hears the sirens, throws on a hoodie, and escapes over the back fence.
- While waiting in line at the bus stop, he checks his hoodie pocket for his bus card and finds a card written in someone else’s handwriting. He opens it and reads “Let’s play a game. I put a bomb on bus 1515. Nobody knows it’s there but you. It will detonate at 7:45. If you go to the police, I’ll detonate it early. I’m watching you.”
- Frantic, Jimmy looks around but sees no one. He asks the bus driver where to find bus 1515. The bus driver looks at him like he’s crazy and says, “This IS bus 1515, are you getting on or not?”
- Jimmy finds the bomb under the back seat. A backpack next to the bomb has his name on it in the same unknown handwriting. Inside, he finds another card, a coil of rope, a cell phone, and a gun.
- The phone rings.
- …
My method looks more like :
- Jimmy finds a bomb under the back seat of the bus. He knows it’s there, but he didn’t place it and the police can’t know (why can’t the police know? If he can go to the police, the ending is too easy. Need a reason why, though.)
- Before that, he’s running from the police (why is he running?).
- Before that, he wakes up to a phone call that tells him to run from the police (that’s why he’s running. Also CRYPTIC STRANGER.)
- After he starts running but before he finds the bomb, he finds a note telling him about the bomb and to not tell the police. (so that’s how he knows to look for the bomb)
- After he defuses the bomb, he gets another message from the mysterious person. (who are you, cryptic stranger?)
Once I have all of those pieces in order, I’ll go through and neaten up the text so that the end result looks like the top one – but my method of getting there was very “this happens before this, and that happens before the other.”
Sloppy, Sloppy!
I don’t want to cut and paste a billion times to try and get things in order. Trying to keep a Word Doc organized with it is driving me nutters. This outline is too loose to use the notecards in Scrivener as I will later.
Application
So I finally knuckled down. I’m a web developer, right? So why not write a web app that does exactly what I want?
So … I did.
And that’s what I’ve been up to.
It’s still got a few features I want to add, but it works WITH my outlining style rather than frustrating it.
Amazing how much more I’m getting done with it, now that I’m not feeling like I’m trying to build a house using only screws and a hammer.
Umm…you left something out of your post, m’dear…
…
…such as, the link to your web-app! :D
And for what it’s worth, Scrivener’s outlining mode has me baffled. I Just Don’t Get It.
.-= Steve Hall´s last blog ..Weekly Wrap-Up: May 24 =-.
@Steve
*laughs* I don’t have a public one yet, and Stained (and a few other projects) are up on it. ^_^
No peeking!
Sounds awesome, Tami. Let me know if you want some design help or beta testing.
.-= Wulf´s last blog ..Freelance Writing =-.
@Wulf
Thanks, Wulf! I might just take you up on that. I do have three more features I want done for really-real before I unleash it upon the masses (like user logins. Heh.)
I’d love to try it out as well. I lurk and read, but this is enough to bring me out of my shell and BEG you for it.
Guess I’m crashing the Nanowrimo Plotting Party. I wandered over from the Scrivener forums and got caught up through the Nano2010 series, and though I admit freely that I’m not following the homework assignments (I would’ve had to cram ‘em all into just a week to get up to speed, and my working method’s a bit different anyway), it’s been fun knowing there are others out there hard at work prepping for November.
Though I’ve been silently stalking for a week or so, going through the old posts, I guess the lateness of the hour has buzzed me sufficiently to creep out of the shadows and comment. I’ve been banging around in Scrivener’s Outliner mode for my Nano2010 plotting, real loosey-goosey stuff like you’ve described above, but I’m finding it’s working pretty well thus far. I’m creating about twenty million documents, of course, but since I’m really viewing everything just in Outliner mode for the time being, I can disassociate the outline with the huge stack of index cards and it’s quite liberating. So bang, bullet point (new doc) for Jimmy looking for the bomb under the desk. List of questions in the synopsis. Sub-bullets (sub docs) for related ideas, possible scenarios in answer to questions, etc. Colored labels (tinting the Outliner rows) to mark up key ideas or “keepers” or “old versions” or whatever.
Just thought I’d throw it out there, since I have the same issue you described with my outlining, which usually ends up a tangled mess before an hour has passed. Using Scrivener’s Outliner has been fun. But I’m looking forward to see what you’ve created with this web app of yours!
@Casi
I guess I’ll have to speed up my development of the login system! *adds it to the development list*
@Jehanne
*laughs* I love gate-crashers!
I’d be curious to know how your method differs from mine. Everyone’s method is different (and from what I can tell, for most authors, every BOOK is different) but I’m always interested in seeing how other people turn an idea into a book!
Thank you so much for the tips on the Scrivener outliner! I think I’ll give it a go, see what I think of it. Can’t hurt, right?
<3
Welcome to the posse, both of you!