Timothy's Thoughts

Y esterday, I introduced you to the simplest story outline you can possibly have, saying that every story can be broken into four equal sections, Problem, Solution, Challenge, and Victory. Today, we’ll look at how we can expand upon that idea to create an outline we can use for a book. Dividing a book into four sections isn’t much of an outline. If you consider a book that has 200 pages and 20 chapters (for simplicity of math) that we’ve outlined using this method, each of the four sections has 50 pages and 5 chapters. There’s a lot that can happen in 5 chapters. So we would like to provide more detail to our outline. One way to start is to say that each of our four sections is a story within a story. We know how to outline a story. From yesterday, we can record the following outline in a text document: Problem: Anna needs a man. Solution: Anna gets to know an attractive man named Chris. Challenge: Anna learns Chris is engaged to Beth. Victory: Anna shows Chris that she’s a better cho...

N o author truly sits down to write without having some idea of where the story is going. A romance author doesn’t come up with a crime novel once in a while just because that’s where the characters took her. A mystery author doesn’t end up with a story with no mystery simply because the characters didn’t take him in that direction. Every author has some idea of how the story will turn out. Despite what some authors will tell you, every author begins with an outline. We know that all romance novels are basically the same animal. They begin with a woman who is in need of love. This woman finds a man. They don’t a seem to the be perfect match. Then change happens and they discover that they need each other. There are many variations on that, but that’s the story every romance author sits down to write. That is her outline. And yet, I’ve been told by many authors that they don’t outline. What they actually mean by that is that they don’t document their outline before they begin writing t...

I deas for stories come in many different forms, but I sometimes struggle with converting those ideas into an actual story. Often what happens is that I picture a scene that intrigues me, but I don’t know where it fits or what I can do with the characters. Even with an outline framework, I began to question what part I should figure out first. As I considered this, I realized that there are five basic elements to every story, a character, a problem, a solution, a challenge and a victory. If we can determine each of these then we have our story. A Character The character is your protagonist . Sometimes you’ll know who this is at the first and sometimes it is better to wait till you determine the other four before deciding on the character. A Problem Your character begins the story with a problem. This isn’t the hook or the initial disturbance , though those things may help to show what the problem is. The bigger the problem is the bigger the story. If you’re talking to a friend, you mi...

T he picture above may not look like much, but it is my attempt at determining where each of the various elements of a three plot structure go. What I found interesting is that some of the structure elements seemed to line up and others seemed to be ofset. Plot A and C run together some at the beginning and the end. I think that is because Sara and Neal are both involved in these scenes. It makes scene that we would keep moving along our structure, as we move along. Plot B doesn't really get going until we get to about page 90. But plot C has a similar gap in comparison to Plot B. Near the middle, things seem to run together more for A and B. But keep in mind that we aren't necessarily talking about them having the same scenes here, just that the midpoints occur close together in time. Anyway, the process wasn't very helpful, so maybe the best thing to do at this point is to start writing these scenes for each plot, with priority given to the A plot and try to work the othe...

O utlining a story is largely a problem of representation. When I outline, I begin with a generic structure and I fill in the gaps. In the end, what I have is a snapshot of the story and the beginnings of a synopsis. I focus on the A-Story because that is the most important part. That is where the primary action takes place. But in my latest outline I have a problem. Some of the subplots are rather healthy stories on their own. They tie back into the main plot, since part of what is happening in them is creating the antagonism for the A-story, but the outline for the A-story becomes very cluttered if we try to include much more than a reference to the subplots. What I have considered doing is outlining each plot separately, using the same generic structure. That isn’t hard to do, but it becomes a question of timing. In the novel , the various plots will all be taking place in and around each other, but how to tie the plot lines back together. In the ou...

Y esterday, I showed you an “outline” that I did in FreeMind. It showed beginning, middle and end, each dividing into chapters which were in turn divided into beginning, middle and end. Let me be clear, that isn’t they way I outline. Yes, every book should have a beginning, middle and end and an episodic chapter should too, but I find those terms don’t help much when outlining. Usually, when I outline in FreeMind, I use a variation on the late Blake Snyder’s outline, which is influenced by the work of Syd Field. Yeah, I know they are both screenwriting gurus, but a story is a story. My take on this outline is shown below: Being a screenwriter, Blake Snyder was big on the storyboard. I don’t work with a storyboard the way he suggested. I tried, but over time, my practice had gotten to the point that I use FreeMind for that purpose, making it “the board.” When I sit down to outline a story, I open up FreeMind and I begin plugging stuff in. I don’t work in a sequential fashion. I may no...

O n another author’s blog I mentioned that when I wrote For the Love of a Devil I outlined it backwards. When I mentioned it, I didn’t think it a particularly foreign approach, but at least one person hadn’t considered that possibility, so maybe it’s worth covering in more detail. Why Outline Backwards There are some good reasons to outline backwards anytime, but in my case, I was working with a story with a known ending. For the Love of a Devil is based on the first three chapters of Hosea . I was also dealing with an unlikely scenario in modern society. Slavery is illegal in America, though it still exists in some form. Read the first three chapters of Hosea, then ask yourself, how do you take a modern woman, married to a good Christian man, sell her into slavery and then have her husband buy her back? The book of Hosea gives us a hint, when we see that Hosea was to choose a wife of the children of whoredoms. Gomer came from a family that didn’t teach her right. But she escaped tha...

When we write a story, we often include events that don't happen very often. These events can make things more interesting, but they can also come across as being unlikely. It can be helpful for the author to do a fault tree analysis to figure out what things he or she needs to put in the story in order to line things up to allow some important event to occur. I have included an example of this in Find_the_Story.pdf . If you would like the FreeMind file, it is available at man_jumps_to_his_death.mm .

There is a very unheated debate over whether to outline a novel before writing it or not. For me, it is easier if I know where I am going, so I create an outline. Also, as I noted in a previous post, if you ever need to write a synopsis, an outline can cut your workload significantly. There are different ways to do an outline. I find that I describe the current state more than I describe the action. The action will come as the manuscript begins to take shape. Below, I have included my outline for For the Love of a Devil . Some of you may recognize the high level outline as coming from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat . If you haven’t read that book, you really should. The numbers beside each heading are word count totals. Blake Snyder defines when things should happen by page count, but novelists tend to think more in terms of word count. My goal was an 80,000 word novel. I went a little above, so the work count is a little off, but the intent was that it would tell me when I f...