Never Believe Your Lying Outline

[inverarity]

I'm reading several books right now, but probably won't finish them until next week or so.

Well, for those of you who don't come for the book reviews, but are hoping for Alexandra Quick tidbits, I have no books to review (though I've got a couple more self-pubbed ebooks to snark about), so this is another of my long rambly self-indulgent author's

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[fpb]

I think authors tend to become tighter and more conscious plotters as they get older. My favourite example is Dickens, where we go from the virtually plotless Pickwick Papers, through things like Martin Chuzzlewit, where he thinks nothing of suddenly sending his protagonist to America because he had run out of things to make him do and wanted to have some fun at the expense of the Americans, to really disciplined and successful plots like those of Dombey and Son and Bleak House, where you hear the clock ticking dramatically away on every foreboding or secret development to come, and everything that happens at every point until the end is a function of what has been posited at the beginning.

I don't outline - so far. I am trying to learn, because it has become clear to me that this is the cause of my dramatic failure as a long story writer. I have written dozens of short stories - good ones, too, I like to think - because a short story allows a single good idea to be worked out as much by intuition as by anything else. And the idea is all I have when I start. I could point to you the exact place in the street where I was standing when I got the idea for the undoing spell that is the climax of The First Nymphadora, but everything else, including the heroic stance and actions of the protagonist, came as I was writing it. Of course, looking back, it is clear that it all depends on the ending; the ending itself would not have been what it was if the protagonist had not been so heroic and admirable. Conversely, when I started another favourite of mine - It Was All on Account of the Little Russian Girl - all I was clear about was that Umbridge and Minerva had history - someone else had suggested that in a comments threat in FA. I was not even clear that it was going to be homosexual jealousy. Then I came across the pictures of a small Russian woman, interesting more than beautiful, and I had my start, and the rest came out as I was writing - mostly from my own experience.

Sometimes I literally don't know what is going to happen to the protagonists until I am actually writing it. And that is particularly the case with climaxes. When I got started My Father: An Episode from the First Voldemort War, I knew quite clearly that it was to be about a decent young man victimized by a soulless, psychopathic father; but it was writing out the increasing degrees of constriction, use, abuse, and deceit, that led me to realize that there was only one possible end to the story - by all accounts one of my more successful climaxes. And in the case of Singing over the Waters, I at first did not even know who was going to feature in it! All I knew is that I had a mood - something to do with music and intense, heartbreaking, dangerous beauty - and that I had to find the words to fit that mood.

However, I am clear now that this has to change. I have a number of longer stories of which only one (A Crime to Outlive Him) has been anything like finished; and re-reading it recently, I found that, while I still like the welter of ideas I put there, the prose is among the worst I ever wrote, screaming to be rewritten. Whether bad style, with every bad feature of the worst of my writing, is directly to do with the strain of writing out a long story (which took me over a year to finish) with no outline, I don't know, but I think it might be. I have a suspicion that as I was writing this, I was finding it so hard to get to the next chapter that I just left anything I wrote lying there as I forced myself on. So I have to start outlining, even if I forget the outline afterwards. It is as necessary as the trellis for a climbing plant. But that is just me, and other writers will say differently.