Time for an update on my preparation for the infamous 3-Day Novel Contest coming up in a couple of weeks. The rules have nothing against preparation, only that you can’t actually start the draft until the contest officially begins. As I pointed out in my last post on this I’m technically in violation of the rules already (and hence not officially entering the contest itself) because the story I’ve chosen is one I started years ago and never finished, but nevertheless I plan on following them in so far as I can.
The form of preparation I’ve chosen is very different from what I’ve used in the past. An experiment, of sorts. Not an outline, but something that bridges the divide between an outline and an unplanned first draft. You see, I’ve always been the type of writer who just dives right in to the first draft rather than plan out the story in advance. I rather enjoy this method for its sense of in the moment creation and discovery, but find that it comes with one rather dramatic downside. It takes quite a while to finish something this way.
I didn’t really realize this length of production was the case until a few years back when I read the memoir/writing book Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life by one of my all time favorite authors, Terry Brooks. In it, Terry talks about the importance of outlining your books before writing them. I’ll admit to a great deal of reluctance going into that chapter. I had a fear, as I suspect many who just dive into their drafts do, that outlining would somehow taint the creative power of my work and even flirting with the idea of it was to invite disaster. But you know what? The case Terry makes for outlining just makes too much dang sense. He points out the great advantages, both creative and productive, to figuring out your story before you sit down to execute the telling of it. Being able to write the story itself more quickly, figuring out many of the major problems you’re likely to encounter and being able to address them in the form of hundreds of words in an outline rather than tens of thousands in the draft. The list goes on.
I looked at my own process and saw the flaws and realized that this outlining thing could probably help me quite a bit. I also realized that I basically did outline my books in advance already, I just didn’t write the outline down and relied on trying to remember things I had planned, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I was determined to try outlining and see if it would help me, so on my next novel after reading Sometimes the Magic Works I did just that. I came up with a structure I thought would work pretty well for me and after brainstorming a bunch of ideas molded the good ones into it before I sat down to write.
It was a disaster. I didn’t realize that at first. Everything seemed to be going great. I was sailing through the first draft and when I did get stuck I could consult the outline to help me figure it out. Nevertheless things were going south.
There’s this interesting point Terry makes in the chapter on outlining which is very important for anyone making their first foray into outlining to remember. He points out that nothing informs a writer on how their story should be written better than the actual writing of it and that you will think of better ways of doing things when you’re actually sitting down typing. My problem was that, somehow, having it written down made my brain unable to deviate from the outline. So even though I realized the story really wasn’t working on any level, I wasn’t able to stop myself from pushing onward until I had a completed draft. A draft written to an outline that had seemed okay but was actually flawed, that started out promising and then devolved into an almost nonsensical mess. I was able to fix it in revision (a herculean feat of which I am quite proud), but those revisions took a very, very, very long time.
As you might imagine I wanted to know what had gone wrong so I experimented more with outlining on a number of short stories to try and figure out what the problem was. I was able to quickly conquer the “I can’t deviate from the outline” issue simply by recognizing that I was having that problem, so I knew the issue was something else. As it turned out the problem was that in an outline format, I couldn’t see the story. I know that sounds weird but its true for me. I guess you could call it outline blindness or something. Planning a story in the form of an outline somehow leaves me unable to see the story for what it is, and unable to identify the problems before they crop up in the draft, which pretty much defeats the whole purpose of doing an outline in the first place.
Dejected, I had pretty much given up on the idea of planning out my stories in advance until recently when I stumbled on a writing term I had never encountered before; Story Treatment. I saw it crop up several times in reference to various things. Star Wars. The Jungle Book movies. I even ran across it on an old blog post by Neil Gaiman talking about the importance of writers having a will to spell out who will inherit the rights to their work. Curious, I looked it up.
Story treatments are a document largely used by screen writers, though I have run across a few examples of novelists using them as well. They are sometimes written after the fact as a marketing document to help pitch a script to studio execs, and sometimes as a development tool when working on a new script. Written in third-person prose, the treatment can almost be described as an abbreviated first draft. You lay out the various highlights of the story you’re going to tell, occasionally throwing in a few lines of example dialogue. What does the character do, how does it change him, and so on is all laid out in a form meant to be thrilling and engaging, just not a novel. The treatment tells the story of a story, if you will, and as a development tool is often written much like one would write a first draft; by just diving in and writing it.
I was greatly intrigued by this idea. Here seemed to be something that could allow me everything I love about diving into the first draft while also enabling me to take advantage of all the perks that come from planning the novel out in advance. So, I decided that while Roc Rider was out on Beta Read I would test drive this new method with my story for the 3-Day Novel contest.
How is it turning out? So far, splendidly. I’ve already identified several major flaws in the story that I would otherwise have noticed when I was almost three quarters of the way through the draft. I would have been facing down the prospect of deleting or rewriting thousands of words in order to fix them, whereas now I have to change at most a couple hundred to nip the major flaws in the bud before they have a chance to become a major headaches.
For example, I quickly discovered that this fantasy based around a love story, which is supposed to feature two strong individuals as the lovers in question, actually had one strong guy and a female object with a one-dimensional personality who’s sole purpose in the story was to be loved by said guy. Unacceptable. No way will I intentionally let that fly, so the treatment has morphed to fix it and now (provided I execute well) it will be one less major problem I’ll have to fix once the draft is done.
Will I find the story treatment method so awesome and useful I’ll adopt it for all my writing? Maybe. It remains to be seen how well the actual writing of the book goes. But I have high hopes, and you can be sure I’ll let you know how it turns out here on the blog. If it turns out well maybe I’ll do a workshop on story treatments for novelists to help other authors in the position I find myself in, of wanting to plan in advance but finding that outlining doesn’t work.
That’s it for today’s update. Stay tuned for more exciting Aaron vs. the 3-Day Novel Contest coverage as the big weekend approaches!
