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clarification for Christoffer
1. It seems as if the outline you mention at the beginning undergoes some fairly heavy changes as it evolves into a book (characters getting killed off, or not, as the case might be), which leads me to believe (perhaps wrongly) that you write the outline before getting down to the nitty-gritty of a, b, c and d?Nope, no real outline to start with. Just some major plot points, and some idea of where I'm going to end up. However, as I get deeper into the book, I will sometimes pause between chapters and make notes to myself about what needs to happen next, who has got the upper hand and how power is going to be moved to the other side. This harkens back to an early post I did about tension in plotting. Here's a piece of that post, edited and reproduced so you don't have to hunt for it:
... in any narrative, the parties in conflict have to be on equal footing in terms of power and control, even if that doesn't seem to be the case on the surface. This is how tension is created, and you keep the reader interested. Power takes many forms. A woman incapacitated in a wheel chair, unable to feed herself, hardly able to talk, can be a poweful presence in the life of a young, healthy daughter. With this idea in mind, have a look at this simple schematic of how tension and story arc work together. It's adapted from Janet Burroway's classic text on writing fiction, now in its sixth edition. If you study it (click on the image to enlarge), you'll see how power moves back and forth between the forces of good (Cinderella) and evil (the Stepmother). Kinda like capture the flag, but without the flag. You can take any novel or movie or play or episode of television and look at it in these terms to figure out how it's structured (or where the narrative begins to lose its rhythm).
I keep track of these tension/power issues in a very concrete way as I write, which is as close as I come to an outline.
2. Also, wouldn't you have to have the characters ready and waiting to jump into the plot if you work in this manner? Of course, in the Wilderness series you did just that (I gather), but what about minor characters? Do you just thread them in as you go along, or do you develop them first, in order to make them fit better into the pattern?I don't plan secondary characters in any conscious way ahead of time. Some characters just get threaded in as things go along, because they won't be around long. They show up, we have a little conference and I make some decisions about how important they are going to be, and how much print space they need. This is where my love of Dickens shows the most, I think, in that I have a hard time dismissing secondary characters without at least a little attention. Readers who are put off by my long list of characters would probably run off in horror if I included all the secondary and teriary people who float in and out.
Characters who are going to be fairly pivotal, even for a short period of time, I will stop and think about in more detail. For example, there's a trio of women in Queen of Swords, a middle aged daughter, her mother, her mother's servant, who are going to be quite important to various plot developments. As I was thinking about them in relationship to each other and to the rest of the characters I realized I was going to have to stop and make notes, which I did. I constructed a brief backstory and timeline, which I'll refer to now and then when they come into the story.
March 31, 2004 06:21 AM
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