The Tao of Writing #2: Outlining, Outlining, Outlining

So it's 2014 and the air is alive with the promise of a new year.  You're going to climb that mountain!  You're going to lose those pesky twenty pounds!  You're going to be awesome and get that tattoo!

Or maybe you finally want to write that novel that you know, deep down, you've got somewhere inside of you.  The only problem is, where do you start?

That's the question I want to explore on this month's edition of The Tao of Writing.   I've got to say though, that writing my first novel, The Prisoner and The Assassin was more of an exercise in chaos theory than anything else.  The butterfly flapped its wings somewhere and I started writing.  Most of what I wrote was very, very bad but underneath the muck and mire, I found myself looking at not one, not two but three books (The Prisoner and The Assassin, the sequel (which I'm just getting go on now) and it's prequel- after that, I started getting serious about organization.

I'm not sure what other novels I work on are going to be like, but it took me a long time to actually start to get a grip on the first one and figure out how to spin a story out of the mess of writing I had just created and the easiest way I found to do that was a simple outline.

I say simple but they can, in fact, be as complex as you want them to be.  Some people plan whole scenes out meticulously, chapter by chapter but I took a simpler approach and just wrote a short description of each scene in the chapter. I was a bit dubious at first, but in the end just having one proved to be a valuable way to organize my novel.

I'm also one of those people that likes to do a lot of writing in my head.  Sometimes it can just sort of pop into my head and go from there.  Sometimes, it helps to actually go there and get a sense of the place.  (I used Google Maps/Street View quite a bit, but that can't make up for actually going an experiencing a place- that scene in Chapter 11 where Abby and Mara are watching the protest marching coming up Washington Avenue- I a)  Weirdly, an Adele song triggered a whole scene for me. (But you'll have to wait until prequel to get to that one.)

Fortune Cookie version of all this: Big Ideas can take many forms, but to go from big idea to novel,  you've got to get your ducks in a row and organize it!  And how do you want to do that?  (Say it with me!)  Outline, outline, outline!

But here's the thing:  what works for me, may not work for you, so I reached out to former co-worker, talented writer, friend and fellow author Jade Eby (who blogs over at Chasing Empty Pavements and over here as well.) to see what her process was and how she went from her 'Big Idea' to her novel.  And she was more than happy to stop by and share:

I'm actually much like Tom in that my tiny seedlings of an idea cannot bloom unless I water them properly. That being -- a proper outline with lots and lots of plotting. 

My writing life is much like my "real" life in that I'm someone who doesn't particularly like the unknown. I want to know what's going on and when. All the time. Jumping right into a novel without any idea of what's going on is a death wish for me. 

When I get that "shiny new idea," the first thing I do is write it down. It doesn't matter where I'm at, what I'm doing or who I'm talking to. If that idea comes knocking, I'm going to answer. There are some idea that need longer to marinate in the brain and some that literally scream at you to work on them immediately... those are the ideas that I usually go with. Mostly because the voices inside my brain won't shut up! 

My process usually takes the same form every time. I find/create a playlist of songs that inspire me for the particular novel at hand. These are songs that maybe gave me the idea in the first place, or the speak to a character's emotional well being at a point in the name. No matter what, I ALWAYS have a playlist that I create. I'm a very visual person so anything that can inspire me aesthetically is also brought together. Before the good old days of Pinterest, I'd just find pictures online and download them to the computer and pull them up when I needed or print them out. Now, I just create a board on Pinterest and put them there for easy access. 

Then I plot/outline. This is the most fluid item in my process. It can range from days to weeks to months until my plotting/outlining is done and before I can start drafting. 

That, in a nutshell, is how a novel starts from a tiny seed of an idea to a flower in bloom. It takes a little while, but once you're all done -- you've made something quite beautiful. 

The crazy part of all of this is that part of the writing process is figuring out what exactly your formula for success is will be a little different for each and every author.  So if you've think you've got that novel somewhere inside of you, what are you waiting for?  Get organized and get cracking- let me tell you from experience, heaving  my first one over the finish line felt like it took forever.  But I'm glad I did...