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The outline tree can be bare at first...
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Outlining: one writer’s approach

by Diane Duane

A note as we begin: Mostly this blog (per its name) is a place I talk about just about everything but writing. Over time, though, people have started asking me questions about the business and practice of novel- and screenwriting, and I’ve been thinking about where to put the answers. Finally I figured something out. So this post—along with various others on writing that have wound up here or on my Tumblr over time—will be colocated at the new FicFoundry.com site when it goes live at the end of this month (July 2020). Eventually this post will be redirected from here to FF.com… just so people know.

First of all: The tweet from Rebecca F. Kuang that started off the thread is here.

Then adding:

…What followed was an off-the-cuff recreation of an ask-box answer on Tumblr that goes back a few years (so if you follow me over there and this seems familiar to you, you’ll know why).

…Let me say from the outset that from the beginning of my career as a professional writer I have always been a plotter. This started out, not as an instinctive preference or a random developmental thing, but as a mere fact of life—because after I sold my first book I went straight into screenwriting. And what’s important here is that, if you’re writing for series TV, there is no pantsing allowed. PERIOD. Your story editor (or producer, or showrunner, or head-of-story) needs to know immediately what the paying customers are going to be getting: needs to know exactly. Therefore the first thing you usually do (when not pitching verbally, or else having just done so) is submit a précis [very short description of characters and plot, 2-3 pp] or premise [same but longer: 8-10pp] for approval. Until this paperwork is turned in and approved, you’re not commissioned to do the work at all. So outlining—even if just a very simple sort—is at the very root of that entire creative process. Then you go on to a full outline (depending on the length of the script to come & how much money is riding on the work, this might be 20-30 pp…) before the screenplay stage. Every stage of the business of screenplay production has some kind of outline underpinning it.

So: multiply such a set of events by twenty or thirty scripts and you can see how with this kind of work history, if you’re not already an outliner, you’re likely to get hardwired that way in a big hurry. By the time I started my second and third novels in the mid-’80s, I was pretty much locked in as a plotter/outliner for life. And it’s worked quite well for me.

As regards the process of constructing an outline: C. J. Cherryh taught me a method which I now think of as “the Shopping List Technique” and which has served me well for the last three and a half decades or so.

Simply this: you sit down and make a list of the ten things that have to happen in your novel—the character actions or physical events without which your story simply cannot occur. Then, when you’re sure you’ve got pretty much the ten major “event beats” or character issues nailed down, you break each of those ten things into its own section and list the ten things that have to happen surrounding that event or supporting that character action. You take your time over this work, because this is the skeleton of the body of your work to come—the physical / emotional / action structure on which you’re going to build your novel.

And rather than being restrictive, being scene-by-scene detailed at this stage of the work is incredibly freeing. Having this solid scaffolding to build on lets you turn your full attention to character business and interaction… because you already know who’s got to go where and what they’ve got to do. You can now wallow in Drama and Spectacle and All The Feels, and not have to waste time sweating the workaday details of the who-goes-where-and-what-happens choreography.

You have, in essence, drawn your road map. Now you journey. If (along the way) you find that the road wiggles in ways that work better for your story than the original ones—then, fine, you redraw that part of the map. But the map preserves for you a sound basic representation of where you’re going; something you can fall back on in need, or if your focus shifts without warning.

Let me spend a little time here dealing with the actual process of outlining the way I do it. (And naturally I’m going to preface this with the caveat that just because this works for me is no reason for anyone to take this method as any kind of gospel. Finding your own way is a vital part of the Writer’s Journey. But if some part of this seems to work for you: steal, adapt, run off with the goodies! Others shared what worked for them with me: it’s a pleasure to pay that forward.)

Those lists of ten-things-broken-down-into-ten-more-things start out for me as incredibly messy scribblings on the fabled Magic Note Paper and then get typed into whatever outline processor I’m using at the moment. …Unfortunately I have none of those messy pages to show you, because as they’re transcribed, I destroy them to keep from confusing myself later as to whether that material’s been handled or not. …These days, anyway, the lists go into Scrivener …and the result is likely to look something like this.

Screenshot from the TALES OF THE FIVE #3: THE LIBRARIAN outline

…The formal breakdown-of-tens may or may not remain static or be visible in such a document at any given point due to sections or bits of business being combined or telescoped into one another, and the numbers of beats and sections may change without warning. This is perfectly normal for novel outlining. You discover as you start more closely investigating / filling in the Tree of Tens that some sections need different contents, lengths, or rhythms.

This is the “filling in empty spaces on your map” department, where (for me anyway) the real exploration and revelation of the story happens. In the outliner, scraps of scenes, dialogue, and descriptions of business can now get slotted in. (Scrivener makes it a lot easier to organize and rearrange them than it used to be in a Word document: but it doesn’t matter in the slightest in what kind of word processor you’re doing this. Just break the ten “big sections” into divisions big enough for you to comfortably work in.) In these separate sections, action can be amplified or refined: motives and character interactions can be expanded and explored.

In my case, the outline sections and subsections start to contain long text passages that arise to be written while considering the subsection titles. (Considering them as prompts may be helpful.) Or they may just contain very linear notes about what has to happen. Or both. And this part of the outlining can go on for a good while, as it becomes clearer what material is needed in the story and what’s surplus to requirements.

This business of describing what has to happen—in the strictly linear sense—will normally be pretty much complete before I’m ready to submit anything to an editor. It may be helpful to think of what we’ve been discussing so far as a much expanded or differently-structured version of what a scriptwriter might consider a beat sheet / beat outline. But also for consideration here should be what kind of outline you’re going to send to your commissioning editor when you’re querying and they ask you for a specific kind of “partial”, the traditional “three-chapters-and-an-outline”.

Around here, this sort of outline gets handled in different ways. The editor may have worked with me before and may already be familiar with how my outlines reflect the finished novel, even though they may not be broken out into chapters. Those editors will tend to get an outlined description of events that’ll be heavier on the emotional context. Example: the premise-cum-outline I sent Harcourt for The Wizard’s Dilemma. This is on the short side because I knew my editor was perfectly familiar with the first four books in the series.

On the other hand, one may be pitching to an editor one hasn’t worked with before, in which case breaking the outline clearly into chapters may be smarter. This version of a novel outline was what went to my editors on what became The Book of Night with Moon. Since in this case the editors already had chapters 1 through 3 as part of the pitch package, what they then got was the outline for the book onward from chapter 4. (You’ll have to just imagine the first three chapters. Essentially, a trio of cat wizards pick up an unexpectedly punk-ish apprentice.)

Now, the linear-looking stuff that you saw in the Scrivener screenshot above, and the outlines that went to the editors and sold the books, are obviously very different. The latter sort of outline is synthesized from the former. But it’s important to do so with the emotions, and the emotional content, fully in place.

And this is where the problem that @kuangrf was mentioning in that earlier tweet can easily be handled. While the List-of-Ten-Tens method is extremely effective for handling the mere business of physical action (“A goes to B, kills C, flees the country”), it’s just as effective for structuring the flow of emotional events and interactions among characters. I routinely include the two “streams” in the same section, particularly because for me they need to be driving each other; it seems inevitable to me that what you have to do will drive how you feel about doing it. So no need for an outline to be dry or abstract! In fact it works better (I think) if it’s not. The more emotional juice you can pump into it, the more will ooze out when the reader bites.

For example: the very first of the ten-of-ten for Tales of the Five #3: The Librarian (which we’ve been looking at in the screengrabs) said “[King] Freelorn has an unnerving dream that tells him he’s got to go on a journey…”. And the first of that chapter’s ten subsections simply said “He wakes up too early and spends a while looking at [his husband] Herewiss in ‘missing you already’ mode: then gets up, does his morning stuff, and goes to work.” And the first time I sat down to work on that chapter, I got this right back from that section’s prompt:

Text from TALES OF THE FIVE #3, THE LIBRARIAN
(A concept-art image of the moment is here.)

…So bake the emotion into the outline along with the physical action / broader thematic structure, and it will do it nothing but good. And make your job easier.

…There the thread pretty much ended. There’s just one background / thematic thought I want to add.

I think there’s too broadly spread-about (and often unquestioningly accepted) a narrative that says that outlines are somehow creativity-deadening or -defeating, or will suck the life or spontaneity or whatever out of your prose writing. Let me qualify this assertion immediately by saying that I understand perfectly well that there are writers for whom this mode of novel management doesn’t work; that they’ve attempted it, and feel that valuable creative energy is lost to them in the structuring process. That experience must be respected. Whatever you do that works for you is valid.

But I do feel that outlining isn’t given a fair shake, a lot of the time, by people who’ve never tried it and just don’t like the sound of it because it doesn’t sound fun enough. And what troubles me most about this is that too much unexamined advocacy for the Yay Let Us Be Utterly Free And Unfettered In Our Creativity school of thought* is depriving a lot of new writers of a really terrific tool that can keep you from doing something that over weeks and months and years is truly terrible: wasting creative time.

For my money, possibly the single most poignant line in Avengers: Endgame was Tony Stark saying to his dad (in both bittersweet and quite ironic mode, considering) that “no amount of money ever bought a second of time”. When you’re early on in your creative career, and possibly have your best energy levels at your command, it’s easy to feel as if all eternity is before you… as if blowing a week or a month (or six months or a year) on the free-and-unstructured development of a project is no big deal. But later on, in both the short and long terms, you may find yourself revisiting that attitude with considerable regret. And the paradox attached to the resistance of outlining among new / just-getting-started writers is that this is the stage at which it’s most likely to be useful to you. From that earlier post on Tumblr:

At the very beginning of this process, outlining is the easiest and most straightforward way to go, and eliminates the chance of you wasting time by running down a lot of blind alleys and getting caught up in choices that you don’t need to be trying to make at this stage of the operation. Later on, as you get better at this setup process and more confident about it, you can dump outlining if you find yourself disliking it and are able to produce reliable similar-quality results without it. For now, though? Help yourself out by making yourself a shopping list until you can be more certain you won’t forget the stuff you went to the store for.

So let an older writer just say here to the younger ones, the newer ones: We want more of your work, and of your best work: not less. Outlining might work for you—might indeed save you surprisingly large amounts of time, uncertainty and frustration that would otherwise be wasted in waiting for the stars to align or the Muse to arrive or whatever. Just give it a shot, okay? Please and thank you.

…So that’s that. Thanks for reading. And believe it or not, I actually do have to go work on the outline for something at the moment. So if you’ll excuse me? …And enjoy your day.

*Please don’t mistake me here. I’ve written in that mode often enough, and it’s utterly fabulous when it’s working correctly. But over the long run, over a career, with deadlines and other people’s jobs riding on your output turning up in a timely manner, depending on it always to work is dangerous. C.S. Lewis says somewhere that the greatest illusion in which creative people indulge themselves is that what they’ve done once, they can do always…

Also, for those who’ll inevitably ask: yes, I’ve tried pantsing! In fact I’m doing a pantsing project right now. And it is LIKE BREAKING ROCKS WITH MY HEAD. Excruciatingly difficult and painful! But I committed to [REDACTED FAMOUS WRITER] that I’d do this to give the concept a fair shake… so I will be following that project through to the end. (It’s this one. It is entirely possible that I’ll fail at this in ways that have never been seen before, but for fairness’s sake it has to be done. Because I can’t fairly ask people to do something, i.e. attempt the Completely Different Method, that I’m not willing to do myself…)

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booksFoodFood, restaurants and cookingrecipesWriting

Ludwig Bemelmans’ NY Oyster Bar Shellfish Pan Roast Recipe

by Diane Duane

I love Ludwig Bemelmans for many reasons that usually have more to do with writing and his challenging career arc than with food (more details here). But this post’s about the food, and a specific favorite recipe.

In his collection of “slice-of-culinary-life” writings La Bonne Table,  Bemelmans passes on a bit of info that many New Yorkers, or visitors to the city, would be glad to have: the original recipe for one version of the famous shellfish pan roast served at Grand Central Terminal’s venerable Oyster Bar and Restaurant (a venue much appreciated by the cats in the Feline Wizardry series, as well as by the series’s author, who ate there as often as she could afford to while living and working in Manhattan).

So here’s the image of the page in La Bonne Table where the recipe/method appears, and a transcription of the method. He gives the version for the clam pan roast: for an oyster one like the one in the header image, I just substitute canned oysters and enough fish stock or consommé to equal the amount of clam broth Bemelmans quotes. All kinds of shellfish work brilliantly in this (and if you’re actually in the Oyster Bar some time and feel inclined toward this dish, you might like to order the combination one, which has a little bit of everything). I’ve broken up the original block of his text for readability’s sake: may his kindly shade forgive me.

 

We went to rake for cockles, which are like our clams, except for their globular structure, and they taste like Little Necks. I gave the hostess a recipe, which I found in Grand Central Station’s sea-food bar, where a Greek chef who makes it wrote it down for me and showed me how it’s made. It is one of the best things to eat, simple to make– in fact, nobody can go wrong. It’s a meal in itself, and it costs very little.

You need paprika, chili sauce, sherry wine; also celery salt, Worcestershire sauce, butter according to your taste, and clams. I use cherrystones, which are washed and brushed, and then placed in a deep pan with their own liquid. For each portion of eight, add one pat of butter, a tablespoon of chili sauce, 1/2 teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce, a few drops of lemon juice and 1/2 cup of clam broth. Add a dash of celery salt and paprika.

Stir all this over a low fire for three minutes. Then add four ounces of light cream or heavy cream, according to your taste, and one ounce of sherry wine, and keep stirring. When it comes to the boiling point, pour it over dry toast in individual bowls. Add a pat of butter and a dash of paprika and it is ready to serve.

If you have made too much of it, put the remainder in a container in your refrigerator. It will be as good, warmed up, a week or a month* later. It’s called Clam Pan Roast, if you ever want to order it at Grand Central Station’s Oyster Bar. I understand the recipe originally came from Maine.

(This post originally appeared at the author’s Tumblr, and is reproduced here so people who [correctly] aren’t wild about their ToS as regards data sharing don’t have to go over there.)

*I love his enthusiasm here, but frankly I wouldn’t leave this in the fridge for any month. A few days maybe. (Though it must be said, I couldn’t leave it alone that long anyway. It’s really good.)

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The Feline Wizards novels
booksFantasy and SFFeline WizardsWritingYoung Wizards

The full Feline Wizards series now at Ebooks Direct

by Diane Duane

It’s a pleasure to be able to let everyone know that all three of the Feline Wizards books — The Book of Night with Moon, To Visit The Queen (published in the UK as On Her Majesty’s Wizardly Service), and The Big Meow — are now available in ebook form from Ebooks Direct.

The delay on this has been due to the rights for the first two books still being held by their original US publisher. They couldn’t be reverted until sales fell below a certain point. A month or so ago it transpired that they’d finally crossed that threshold, so reversion proceedings could begin… and those are now complete. I’ve taken the opportunity, while the paperwork was being sorted out, to go over the text of both of the first two books and make some textual corrections. Nothing major — just some tidying to bring the copy more into line with my present writing style.

Right now the Feline Wizards ebooks are only available at Ebooks Direct. It’ll take a month or so for the major online retailers to be notified about the reversion by the previous publishers, and for those editions to be pulled. Once this has happened, early in the New Year the (slightly) revised ebooks will be made available through Amazon and other online sources. Watch this space, or the Ebooks Direct news blog, for more information.

For those of you interested in an omnibus edition of the ebooks: there isn’t one yet, as I’m still looking into the pros and cons. (Among other things: I have to spend some time crunching the numbers to see whether omnibus publication of ebooks is actually making sense in terms of sales at this point.)

New paperback editions of all three books, with unified covers, will also appear via Amazon’s CreateSpace arm some time between next week and mid-January. (I have to think a little more about what kind of covers are going to work best at Amazon. The new EBD ebook covers are nice enough, but they aren’t necessarily the ones that will work best for the paperbacks.) The prospect of hardcovers is still hanging in the air, as Lulu has proven itself annoyingly difficult to deal with and I haven’t yet had time to adequately evaluate other options.

Thanks again for your patience, everybody! I’ve been waiting a while to get all these reverted to me, and it’s so satisfying to have them sorted out at last.

One other note:  if you’re a subscriber to the original Big Meow subscription project who hasn’t yet done so, please use this link to add your contact data to our MailChimp contact list. We’re in the process of reaching out to all original subscribers to make sure they’ve received all their subscription materials. Thanks in advance for your help!

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Hardcover edition of Games Wizards Play
AmazonbooksebooksHome lifeKindleWritingYoung Wizards

It’s real!

by Diane Duane

From my point of view, this is one of the few perks an author gets that’s worth anything. A month before pub date… I get mine first.

It’s real now. The sale doesn’t matter (well, okay, it matters, but only as the setup for this): the rewrites don’t matter, the first pass pages don’t matter, the ARCs don’t matter. Only when one of these arrives is the book really real for me. Only when the whole finished thing can be picked up and held in the hands does it become honestly, genuinely, really-and-truly a book.

Now I open that bottle of champagne that’s been lurking in the fridge since New Year’s. It took a while, but here’s Games Wizards Play, finally. Real.

Wanna preorder it? Go here for Amazon, here for B&N.

Want the in-between book between A Wizard of Mars and this? Interim Errantry is here as an ebook at Amazon, or here DRM-free from Ebooks Direct, or here as a paperback.

And meanwhile I can get back to work on the next one…

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International Association of Media Tie-In Writers logo
booksConventionsFilm and TVMediaStar Trek and other licensed propertiesWriting

On receiving the IAMTW “Faust” Award

by Diane Duane

IAMTWjpg
The formal acceptance of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers’ Grand Master / Lifetime Achievement Award at SDCC 2014:

I want first of all to thank the IAMTW for honoring me with this award. I don’t think of myself as particularly grand, and mastery is a goal I’m usually convinced is a long way off; but it’s nice to be disagreed with so publicly.

 

I really hate it that I can’t be with you to accept this. But work at the European end of things is keeping me at home, and I’m pretty sure that that incredibly prolific and committed storyteller Frederick Faust, who wrote as Max Brand and under so many other names, would back me up in saying that the work comes first.

 

In any case: in accepting this let me chiefly thank the readers, fellow writers, and editors who make it so very worthwhile. You’re the ones whose constant support and friendship over many years have proven that the challenge of working in other people’s worlds is far outweighed by the privilege and pleasure of it — and that playing in those extramural universes, as long as you give your all to the storytelling, is just as honorable and fulfilling a way to spend your life as playing in your own. To my fellow pros and the fellow fans in all the worlds where I work, canonically or otherwise, all I can say is: thanks again, and (until I kick the present project out the door) I’ll see you online! (@dduane)

I’ve really been intensely unhappy that I wasn’t going to be able to be in San Diego to speak the above words myself. There’s much to be said for knowing you’ve won an award before the fact — especially that you don’t have to sit there in a roomful of people twitching about what might or might not be about to happen. I’ve done that a couple/few times, and I can’t really recommend it. Scrubbing in on brain surgery has freaked me out far less.

But stress issues aside, there’s also considerable pleasure in merely having this kind of work acknowledged. A lot of professional writers are ambivalent about doing novel work that’s based on films or comics or somebody else’s storytelling in some other medium  — often a more visual one, or one positioned higher up on the media totem pole. (Since there’s been an unspoken perception among creatives for a long time now that film beats TV, TV beats music, music beats any print medium, and so on down the line, with new forms of visual media squabbling amongst one another as they try to wriggle themselves into the longer-established peer structure.) There are writers who avoid such work because they feel it’s beneath them, or because other people will assume that they’re only doing it for the money – not that the money’s routinely all that great, if the truth be told. Or else they’re afraid that people won’t take the work (or them)  seriously if they do it.

How the newspapers of the time saw the Star Trek revival

How the newspapers of the time saw the Star Trek revival

I would not be one of those writers. My experience is that if you as the writer treat the work seriously, it will be taken seriously… at least by anyone who takes the time to judge it on its own merits rather than their own preconceptions. (And if someone won’t do that, why would you care what they thought?)  As a result I’ve spent a significant portion of my life working hard in other people’s universes, and the only reason I do that is because I feel strongly about what’s come out of them in the past, for good or ill or sometimes both. Routinely, this is not work I get into unless there’s something I really love about the source material.

Star Trek would be the best example of this, of course. I loved it from the moment it turned up on the screen, and I loved it after it fell off the screen into what (up until then) for any other series would’ve been a fairly quick oblivion. But Star Trek had a couple of things going for it that other TV shows hadn’t had until then. It had content that could be syndicated afterwards (for which we have the inimitable Lucille Ball to thank: Desilu, the production company that she ran with her husband Desi Arnaz, invented the concept of syndication.) But more than that, it had a committed, passionate and quick-witted fandom that refused to let it die. They saw — as I saw — something in Star Trek that in terms of its storytelling and its vision was too good to lose. It was that too-often-indefinable thing that makes you want to keep on hearing (or seeing) the stories. This is in its way the purest and most basic of fannish impulses… the gut-deep response to a world you come to love so much that you want to become a part of it, no matter what that looks like, just so long as it keeps going.

In my case it would never have occurred to me in any dream, regardless of its wildness, that the Trek fan fiction I wrote in my late teens was laying the groundwork for other fiction that would eventually plunge me into the media-based fiction world. Or that I’d wind up working right back in the Star Trek universe that I’d loved for so long, and eventually — though much later — in canonical Trek as well. Both sets of circumstances sent me off down kind of a crazy zigzag career path, dizzying sometimes as a switchback road race in the Alps… but the views have been fantastic. On one side, I’ve written for Jean-Luc Picard and Batman and Siegfried the Volsung and Scooby-Doo. On the other, I’ve written novels based on comic characters, novels based on computer games, novels based on RPGs, and most of all, novels based on TV shows — some just being born, some long active, some long defunct. But in all cases they’ve been properties that I’ve been fond of.  So maybe if there’s a message here, it’s that for maximum effect — and certainly, maximum satisfaction at your end — you should write about things you love.

That doesn’t mean that while you do it you should lose sight of the economic realities. One very gifted tie-in writer of my acquaintance used to refer to some of his work by sobriquets such as “Conan the Hot Tub”, “Conan The New Roof…” You do your best to make sure you do your work in places that you not only love, but that are going to pay you a decent wage and treat you honorably. Because the work itself is honorable. There is nothing wrong with writing straightforwardly to entertain, and you have (and should never be afraid to claim) the right to take your payment afterwards with a clear conscience and walk away with your head held high.

…Always assuming you’ve done the work as well as you can, and work to do it even better the next time. The writer who incorrectly assumes that because you don’t own all the rights to it, this is work you can take fewer pains with or “phone in”, won’t be doing this kind of work for long… because the readership will smell it on them, and word will get around. If you’re going to take what we refer to around here as the King’s Shilling, then you must stay bought for the duration of your contract, and give it your full attention and effort. Your unwritten contract with your readers, who’ve spent what Robert Heinlein used to call “their beer money” on your words, demands as much. Fortunately, the more you write, the better you get, as a rule… and the Work For Hire does you the favor of honing skills that will later be turned to your own work, all the sharper for the extra use.

Anyway. Lately I haven’t been doing that much work in other people’s worlds: original writing both at the film and prose ends has been keeping me busy. But my tie-in work has been a great joy to me — the source of much fun and many friendships and (last but most certainly not least) even a factor in the events that led me to the man who married me, and who’s sometimes since done tie-in work at my side. (That Star Trek novel that we wrote on our honeymoon? There’s a statement of commitment if you needed one. It’s not like we didn’t have other things to do.)  🙂

So to have that work so acknowledged is a tremendous pleasure, one I accept with thanks.

And it’s not as if there isn’t just one more Trek novel lying around in the back of my head, waiting for other work to get handled so that I can find out who I need to talk to at Pocket Books these days…

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booksLifeliteraturereading

Crowds retrieve 100,000 books dumped in skip

by Diane Duane

Crowds retrieve 100,000 books dumped in skip

Almost 100,000 new books were dumped into a skip outside a Derry bookshop today after the receiver ordered that the contents of the shop, which closed two years ago, should be disposed of.

…The books, valued at £60,000 (€74,253), were all new.

…As word quickly spread crowds descended on Bishop Street to avail of the book bonanza. Many motorists double parked causing temporary traffic jams as they helped themselves to dozens of the books.

Looking on as the skip was filled and re-filled with the books was Peter MacKenzie, the former joint owner of the Bookworm bookshop.

“I opened the book shop in 1978 and it was my life’s work until I was declared bankrupt in 2012.

“The books were my assets which were seized. The building was also seized and now it has been for sale for the last two years with an asking price of £375,000.

“Four years ago the same building was valued at just over £2 million.

“It’s heartbreaking to see what was once my life’s work being dumped into a skip but at least the books are being grabbed by members of the public and fair play to them”, he said.

This was crossposted from DD’s tumblr http://ift.tt/1inh3TC, where it was published on June 11, 2014 at 10:31AM

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