15 Minute Outlining

It's always a good idea to have a map to where you're going.

 On one end of the planning spectrum, you have those writers who love outlining and planning every single detail, and on the other end you have those who just sort of...write, and see where it takes them. 

Since it's almost guaranteed that you'll write more if you know what you're writing first, I've done my best to come up with a way to outline that can be used by both kinds of authors, and everyone in between. 

This method is a down and dirty quick method, designed to be completed in fifteen minutes or less. It has two phases.

The Big Picture

Most stories consist of two initial disasters, then one final disaster that culminates in an ending. 

Not all, but most. Your story doesn't have to fit along these lines, but assume, for the moment, that it does, and fill in the following:

1. Initial Disaster 1 - The Call To Action

This is the disaster that gets your character's butt in gear. It's the thing that made him leave home, or the thing that makes her decide to get her act together and go out for that scholarship. It's Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle burning to death, the Ringwraiths in Hobbiton, Harry Potter's Hogwarts letter. It's the impetus for your character to get up and take some action.

Scribble down one thing that can get your character moving. Stick to it for now - you can decide to change it if you don't like it later. For now, go with your first instinct. 

2. Initial Disaster 2 - The 'Crap It Got Worse'

Man, now you're in it deep. Now you're on the Death Star and you've got to rescue Princess Leia. Now everyone's arguing over the ring and Frodo's got to decide to take it to Mordor, now someone's trying to kill Harry during his first-ever Quidditch match. Things are serious now, even more serious than they were before.

In this disaster, you can have your character win or lose, but I find it usually stretches out the tension if your character loses something every now and again. This is a really good place to do it.

Sketch down a second disaster to let your character know he's really in deep. You can change it later. 

3. Final Disaster - The Highest Hump on the Rollercoaster

Luke's in the Death Star trench now, and one by one his comrades are being shot down by Darth Vader himself. Boromir's dead, and the Fellowship is unwittingly split. Harry, Ron, and Hermione have to face down all the safeguards surrounding the Philosopher's Stone in order to keep Voldemort from coming back to life.

This is the toughest disaster your character will face. Things are harder than they've ever been, and you have to show it.

Jot down an ending. Not the whole thing, just a few specific details. What happened, and why is it so hard? Will your character triumph, or not? 

That's phase one, done. Don't spend to much time on it. Just write it down, and move on to the next bit. You can always change it later.

The Little Picture

We are now in the business of figuring out what you're writing right now. 

Writing every day can be tough. What do you write about? This is the bit that you can do every day, before you write, to figure out what to do next. Take your big-picture outline, and have a look at it. Mine looks like this:

First Disaster: Ana gets caught stealing a magical substance (quicksilver)

Second Disaster: Ana is trapped in a prison for werewolves with three people to take care of.  The prison is a quicksilver mine. The quicksilver has mutated the creatures in the mine and made them huge and monstrous, and one of them attacks Ana and wounds one of her legs so that she can't walk. 

Third Disaster: Ana is forced to choose between unlocking ALL the prison's inhabitants, and saving her friends, or letting her friends die in order to keep the prisoners locked up. 

I'm not too happy with the second disaster right now, but I'll come back to it. I need to figure out what to write today. So here's what I'm going to do.

The first disaster is: Ana gets caught stealing a magical substance. This is the one I'm working towards today.  The queston I ask myself is:

What is the first step towards propelling her towards the disaster? 

• Show her stealing the quicksilver.

This is the first thing that came to my mind. It's all I need, right now, so I'm going to stop right there.

Next question.

What does the reader need to know about this scene? 

• who Ana is
• why she's stealing the quicksilver
• the risk Ana is taking by stealing the quicksilver

There's where I get what I'm going to write for the day. I'm going to write a scene that shows my character Ana stealing a magical substance called quicksilver.  It needs to demonstrate who Ana is, why she's stealing, and the risk she's taking. (The reader, at this point, doesn't necessarily need to know what quicksilver is, only that Ana needs it.) 

At this point, you can do one of two things. If you don't like the outline, you can go back and edit it, and add more steps towards each disaster, if you like. If you're more of a fly-and-be-free type writer, you can come back tomorrow, and ask What's the next step towards the current disaster? Then, you write that for the day.

Remember, this is designed as a system to help you write every day, and still write towards a goal - so don't fiddle around too much with the outline before you get to work! 

Lessons Doctor Who Taught Me

I could act all professional and write an article that is very in, that is very in keeping with the theme of this blog, that doesn't highlight my massive fangirl nature and is very neat and tidy, thank you very much.

I could do that, but I'm not gonna. I could pretend that I'm completely unaffected by the fact that the new Doctor was chosen today. I most definitely would be capable of writing an article that indicated that I'm not head over heels with Peter Capaldi and I'm not currently plotting large amounts of fanfiction in which his character and Billie Piper's gratuitously smush their mouths together, but that, my friends, WOULD BE LIES.

So, without further adieu, I present to you, 23 things the Doctor taught me.

1. There is no such thing as an unimportant person.

2. It isn't what you're born to, or what you are that makes your destiny - it's what you do.

3. Sometimes you need a hand to hold.

4. What's the point in being grown-up, if you can't be childish sometimes?

5. Metal dogs are the best sort.

6. Stories don't belong to one person. Stories belong to the reader.

7. Life's a cycle - sadness may come around, but life (and the Doctor) always comes around to the happy bits again.

8. There are three levels of fan. There's the casual fan, there's fanboy, and then there's Ascended Fanboy.

9. Current Ascended Fanboys include David Tennant and Peter Capaldi.

10. Being a hardcore fan can actually get you somewhere.

11. If you're brilliant at something, there's no shame in taking pride in it.

12. Bananas are a good source of potassium.

13. The foundation of society should be a man that never would.

14. The most important thing in the universe is an ordinary person.

15. Celery is good for your teeth.

16. Sometimes you're born into your family, and sometimes you choose your family.

17. What's important about you isn't the name you were born with, it's the name you choose and the ideals you dedicate yourself to.

18. Never make a bet with a Time Lord. They'll never cough up - especially when they owe you a chicken.

19. Don't give hot chocolate to strange Aztec women. You might accidentally get engaged.

20. When in doubt, reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.

21. Time is not a linear progression of cause to effect. It's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.

22. There's a better way of living. Not travelling, not seeing amazing things, but standing up and making a decision instead of letting life happen to you.

23. Sometimes, everybody lives!

Writing Basics 101: Using Past Perfect Tense

Today's piece of advice:

95% of the time, you don't need the word "had'.

Yes!Had: 

Rose had a banana. The Doctor wanted the banana, but he also wanted Rose. The Doctor stole Rose's banana, had it for dinner, and then he had Rose for dessert. 

Fail!Had:

Sam and Dean had parked the Impala next to a big, blue box. Dean'd walked around it several times, squinting. 

"What's a 'Police Public Call Box'?" 

Sam had looked confused, too. "It's a holdover from the 1950s, before everyone had cell phones. If there was an emergency, you just found one and used it to call the police." 

Dean had given Sam a look. "Dude. Weird." 

It had obviously been a comment on his intelligence, but Sam wasn't phased. He'd stepped up and put his hand on the box, feeling a slight humming just underneath the surface of the wood. 

"You're telling me. They never used these in America, Dean. They're from England." 

Using "had + verb" is called "past perfect" tense. It's used to describe an action that happened before another action that is happening in the past. A lot of fanfiction authors confuse past perfect tense with plain old past tense, liberally scattering unneeded 'hads' everywhere. 

 Turning a Fail!Had into a Yes!HadSam and Dean parked the Impala next to a big, blue box. Dean walked around it several times, squinting. 

"What's a 'Police Public Call Box'?" 

Sam looked confused, too. "It's a holdover from the 1950s, before everyone had cell phones. If there was an emergency, you just found one and used it to call the police." 

Dean gave Sam a look. "Dude. Weird." 

It was obviously a comment on his intelligence, but Sam wasn't phased. He stepped up and put his hand on the box, feeling a slight humming just underneath the surface of the wood. 

"You're telling me. They never used these in America, Dean. They're from England." 

When It's Okay To Use Past Perfect

Most of the time, you just want to use regular old past tense. But sometimes, when you're using past tense, you need to describe something that happened in the past of the past you're writing about (sheesh, grammar sure is timey-wimey). Like so:

The Doctor thoroughly enjoyed his dessert. Somewhere in the hazy bits, between the flavor of banana and the flavor of Rose, he had lost track of where they'd meant to land, and so when they finally opened the doors, he was not expecting the American midwest, or the two surly-looking boys examining his TARDIS. It was completely worth it, though, because while not nearly as lovely as his magnificent time ship, the car - the car was a thing of beauty.

This has been a public service announcement.  

The Ballad of Grunk and Vork

Once upon a time, there was a man who lived in a cave. His name was Grunk.

Grunk had a lot of work to do, picking berries and fighting saber-toothed tigers off with a pointy stick. He and Mrs. Grunk had four Little Grunks, and the Little Grunks needed to sleep. So Grunk told them a bedtime story, about a hero who fought off three lions with only a sling!

Little Grunk 1 was enthralled. He loved the idea of the heroic lion-slayer, and when he went to little Caveperson school the next day he told his friends all about it. He and his friend Vork played heroes-and-lions during cave recess, and the idea stuck in Vork's head.

Vork went home and told his sister the story - but this time, it was three dragons instead. His sister told it to her friends while lounging at the cave mall, only this time, the hero was slaying the dragons alongside his true love, the cave princess.

The story spread all across the network of caves, becoming a thousand different stories about the same hero with the sling. Each story was different, and each hero was different, but they all retain some of the basic elements.

Now, how does Grunk feel about this?

If Grunk were living by today's rules, he'd take a rock and bean everyone who'd ever muttered a new version of the story across the head. 

Fortunately, cave times weren't rife with unfair copyright law, so he just lived to a ripe old age enjoying the popularity of the story he told to all his little Grunks. 

For thousands of years before copyright law was even A Thing, people have been telling stories about other people's stories. 

Don't ever let someone tell you it's a waste of time.

Don't ever let someone tell you you shouldn't. 

Don't ever let someone tell you it doesn't matter. 

Stealing the precise order of someone else's words is wrong. Taking an idea and making it your own? That isn't wrong. Filtering a story through your own perspective isn't stealing - it's natural. 

So write what you want to write. Tell the internet about a man with a sling fighting off three lions. Make him slay three dragons instead. Give him a love interest. Take her away. Make him a her.

Do whatever you want.

That's how literature grows.