In an early post on this not-quite-blog, I wrote
…one night I woke at 2 a.m. and had the idea. It popped into my head like the answer to a random question on a quiz show. I dashed out of bed and wrote a very rough outline in about half an hour.
There followed a number of emails saying – an outline in half an hour? Seriously?
As much as I’d love simply to grunt my self-satisfied assent, the true answer is -
Well, there are outline and outlines.
Five minutes ago I Googled “novel + outline”, only to find myself bedazzled and aghast at the bountiful harvest of advice that came avalanching towards me. The first link recommended the “Snowflake method” which I found too terrifying to gaze upon, lest it blind me. More generally, there seems to be lot of talk about “obstacles” and “primary goals”, all that stuff.
But here’s my problem with outlines as they’re commonly conceived — it seems to me they’re essentially paradoxical; an abstract of a story that doesn’t exist yet. How can you be expected to know this stuff if you haven’t written the story yet?
Instead of putting myself through that grotesque, illogical torment, I jot down a list of very simple questions. As I work through the list, answering them….a story emerges.
This is easier to show than describe. So below, copied verbatim from a longhand scrawl in an elderly notebook, is my “outline” for the novel that became Burial.
Two men guilty of unsolved murder of teenager – forge normal lives – killing comes back to haunt them
Viewed from a certain angle, this rough idea is also a complete three-act structure — the beginning, middle and end of a story. In order to flesh it out, certain elementary questions clearly need to be asked, specifically: what men? What unsolved murder?
I think of each such question as a way-station, or resting-place. The trick is to navigate from each way-station to the next, without ever getting too far ahead of yourself. So I began writing Burial like this -
- okay, so who are these two men?
- How do they know each other?
- Do they know each other?
The answers became the first few chapters, by which time I’d arrived at the second significant way-station:
- guilty of unsolved murder of teenager
Which I addressed by asking yet more basic questions:
- How?
- Where?
- Was it deliberate?
- If so, why?
- Was it an accident?
- If so, how?
- Who is the teenager?
- Someone they know?
- (Then how come they don’t get caught?)
- Someone they don’t know?
- (Then how do they meet?)
- At a party!?
- Whose party?
So Burial got written as it got solved: one question at a time. From such simplicity, complexity emerges.
This may look like a chaotic and muddled way of working, but a clear advantage is that the unwritten novel is no longer a single, unscalable peak which rears like a vengeful god above your head. Instead, it becomes a long, rugged staircase cut into the side of the mountain. Each step is a question, and the answer to each question takes you another step closer to your goal.
Which isn’t to say it’s easy going. Sometimes you’re marching along, sometimes you’re staggering wretched and unshod,
but you only have to make it as far as the next step. There, you can sit and catch your breath, review where you’ve come from, how you got there – and how far there is to go, if you’ve got the stomach for it.
So my claim to have dashed off an “outline” in half an hour may look a bit disingenuous, but it was true – except the “outline” was just a rough three-act structure in three blunt sentences — followed by eight or nine questions of the who, what, why and how? variety.
I’m about half way through answering those questions, which involved answering hundreds of much smaller questions – where do they live? What are their jobs? How long have they been married? Has he been faithful? Has she? If not, then with whom was she unfaithful? And why? And where? When? Recently? A long time ago? Does he know? Did she tell him?
Currently I’m about halfway up the mountain. If I crane my neck to look up, I get vertigo. If I look down, I feel quietly satisfied with the progress made.
But mostly I don’t look up or down. I just look at the next step, which is -
Duncan goes to Balthazar with this — but what does she do with it?
I don’t know the answer. But tomorrow I will.
