writing-tips

A Few Varieties and Secrets of Drafts and Outlines

/ Sue Burke / Leave a comment

Fiction writers have an ongoing debate about whether or not to plot: that is, whether to use an outline. But outlines and drafts come in many varieties, which complicates the debate. Here’s everything I know about outlines and drafts condensed into handy bullet points (itself a kind of outline), which I hope will be helpful to you.

Why outline?

• Ideas for novels are too big to hold in your head all at once; you need some sort of notes.

• You might be able to write faster using an outline.

• Outlines can let you write less anxiously because you know what will happen next.

• Outlines are a “big picture” tool to help you revise/re-envision your story for subsequent drafts.

• Leonardo da Vinci used outlines when he painted; this is a respectable artistic tool.

Why avoid outlines?

• Your brain simply doesn’t work that way; you can do just fine without one.

• You lack experience using this tool, so it’s hard to figure out and feels uncomfortable.

A few kinds of outlines

• Three-act structure

• Save the Cat formula

• Romance novel formula

• Scrivener or other software

• 3 x 5 cards or Post-It Notes

• Pictures/scrapbook/artwork/poems

• Spreadsheets/charts/maps

• Hero’s Journey

• Heroine’s Journey

• Fool’s Journey

• Beat Sheets

• Snowflake method

• East Asian four-act kishōtenketsu

• Detailed scene-by-scene

• General chapter-by-chapter

• Character driven

• Theme or narrative focused

• Crisis or paradox centered

• A series of questions

• A series of causes and effects

• Continuous re-evaluation

• Joyous amalgam of all these

Some secrets to using an outline as a writing tool

• You can make an outline at any time: before, during, or after any draft or part of a draft.

• Your outline can be a simple list of beats, plot twists, or key scenes.

• The plot outline is not the manuscript outline, which might not be chronological or logical.

• There is no Platonic ideal story; a story can take different forks in the road along the way.

• You can begin plotting from the end, middle, or beginning of the story.

• Any single step or couple of steps of a standard plot outline can be a short story.

Kinds of drafts

• Zero draft, a wildly experimental initial draft that doesn’t “count” as a first draft.

• Dialog-only draft, with the rest to be filled in during subsequent drafts.

• Disconnected scenes, to be connected in a later draft.

• Fast drafting, writing as quickly as possible without looking back, NaNoWriMo-style.

• Writing each scene as a short story.

• Messy, ugly, crappy early drafts; only the final draft needs to be beautiful.

Exercise: a tiny outline

Summarize your story in three three-word sentences. Such as, for a romance: 1. Girl meets boy. 2. Girl loses boy. 3. Girl wins boy. Or for Hamlet: 1. Hamlet has doubts. 2. Doubts are resolved. 3. Hamlet gets revenge. Does your story have a beginning, middle, and end?

(This post is available as a one-page PDF here.)

Let me talk you out of writing

/ Sue Burke / Leave a comment

“If anyone can talk you out of writing, they should.” I think Harlan Ellison said that — at least, it sounds like something curmudgeonly he would say.

Here’s why you shouldn’t be a writer:

You’re not talented enough. Actually, this is a lie. Of course you have talent. We’re all born talented. Children love to make things, and so did you when you were young. Then you may have absorbed the Romantic Era myth of the artist as a hero who effortlessly produces works of staggering genius that are perfect in the first draft. You can’t do that. Neither can I. Neither could they. If you poke into the biographies of the great, heroic writers, you’ll find they studied hard, worked like dogs, and rewrote endlessly.

You’re too scared. This might be true. But what exactly are you afraid of? Making mistakes? Failure? Rejection? There are all kinds of fears. The Writer’s Book of Doubt by Aidan Doyle lists a wide variety of them. I own the book and I’m scared to read it, although the book also explains how fears can be overcome.

You might not know enough about the writing business. As a result, you have unrealistic expectations, whether you want to try traditional publishing or self-publishing. (Writing without the intent to publish is fine, of course, and if that’s your goal, ignore this paragraph.) However, you can learn about the business. The information is freely available, but…

You don’t want to work hard. And it’s going to be very hard work. This might be the most common reason for not writing. I don’t like to work hard, either. It’s lonely, sometimes boring, and, well, hard. There’s always more to learn, and it’s easy to get lost in books and conferences about writing rather than to sit down and write. Or to watch TV or doomscroll rather doing the research, planning, writing, rewriting, more rewriting, and even redrafting. “The first draft of anything is shit,” as Ernest Hemingway probably said.

When I talk to people who aren’t writers, rewriting turns out to be the thing they find impossible to understand. They can’t imagine needing to rewrite a dozen or more times.

When I talk to people who are experienced writers, they whine about how hard the work is, but they’ll rewrite until it’s right, and they’ll do all the other tasks the job involves. They’ve learned how to work hard.

Do you still want to write? Good. I wish you every kind of success, whatever success means to you. If you want more encouragement, I recommend this free comic, Art & Courage: A Guide to Sustaining a Creative Path, created by the Applied Cartooning Lab. It addresses all kinds of art, not just writing or cartooning.

And finally, here’s some writing advice that keeps me going:

“Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” — Isak Dinessen. That is, you’ll have good days and bad days, sometimes good months and bad months, and letting it affect your self-definition or self-worth will leave you emotionally exhausted. You can’t write if you’re too tired.

For me, writing (and other art) contains within itself a constant source of joy. If you look at the faces of athletes as they enter a stadium or field, many wear big grins. They’re about to do the thing they love the most. They’ll get to work as hard as they can and as smart as they can. They can do their best. You can do that, too, if you choose a creative path, because excellence is always possible. Art lets you bring your whole self to your work.

Using all the senses in writing

/ Sue Burke / 3 Comments

Using sensory details makes writing more vivid so that readers can see, hear, feel, taste, and smell what’s happening in a story.

Naturally, it’s a little more complicated than that.

First of all, we have more than five senses. Vestibular sense involves movement and balance. Proprioception is also called body awareness and tells us where our body parts are in relation to each other and how to do things, like pick up a heavy rock or delicate egg. Chronoception lets us sense the passage of time. We can also sense temperature and pain.

This article at John Hopkins University Press says there are nine senses. An article at the University of Utah Genetics Science Learning Center says there are twenty, but it counts some senses in other animals. That might be useful if we’re writing about non-humans.

The things that we sense are interpreted through our thoughts and emotions, too.

As writers, how do we use these senses in a story? The correct answer to this and many other questions is: It depends. What’s the story you want to tell? What matters to the characters in it? What is the pace you want? Romance novels tend to be lush, and a mystery might be spare, and in either case, the senses that you evoke will guide the attention of the reader to what matters. An intriguing whiff of perfume at a party with contrasting notes of candy-like violets and earthy sandalwood might signal the start of an affair. A barking dog might make Sherlock Holmes deduce.

When we write, it’s best to go directly to the sensation. A bad example: Becky smelled acrid smoke and knew it would be toxic. Instead, this: The smoke reeked of acrid toxins. The reader will know that Becky was smelling it and recognized the smell. Fewer words are always better than more words, too.

Next, why do these particular sensory details matter? An article by Donald Maass, “Moving Along” at Writer Unboxed, shows how to use sensory details to evoke emotion. I’m going to disagree with him, though. He says the final example is “focusing not on visualizing, sensory details,” but I say it is. Count the colors mentioned. Note the things we could taste and feel, especially the dryness. Consider the snippets of conversation we hear. It gives us the full picture with plenty of vivid sensory details in an unselfconscious way by showing us how these things matter.

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(Art: stick figure by Core5ivpro.)

How to write great endings

/ Sue Burke / Leave a comment

How do you write great endings to a short story or novel? At TBRCon, an all-virtual sci-fi/fantasy/horror convention in January, I was on a panel that discussed just that. You can watch it here:

But we only got to talk for an hour, and there’s a lot more to say, so here’s a little more advice:

First of all, what is an ending? You can define it as the point when the major questions of the story have been answered. You can also think of it as the point where the reader finally knows what will happen next: Mystery gets a solution. Action reaches a resolution. Sin earns redemption or damnation. Anguish finds relief. Love enters a relationship. Conflict is settled. Adversaries win or are defeated. Problems yield solutions. Obstacles are overcome.

Short stories differ from novels because a short story generally has only one question to answer. A novel can have several questions, or a central question that keeps changing because each answer leads to new, bigger questions.

I advise knowing the ending before you start writing, at least in broad terms. Remember, you can change your mind if you get a better idea. In my forthcoming novel Usurpation, I knew all along how the novel would end — what the answer to the central question in the novel would be — then I had to figure out how to get there and how to make it as hard as possible to get there. (No spoilers, but the answer is “yes.”)

Some people are pantsers, also called discovery writers, which means they start writing and see where the story goes. I discourage this method simply because it tends to be the most laborious, slowest way to write, and writing is hard enough to begin with. In my experience, the more I know before I start, the easier the first draft is. Besides, if you don’t have a plan, you might grab the first ending you can think of, and it might be weak or unsatisfying.

I also encourage writing all the way to The End without going back and rewriting the first chapter again and again — even if the story changes and now the beginning needs to be rewritten. Of course the story changes. It always does. So the first chapter will need to change, too. But the beginning should connect to the ending, and until you reach The End, you won’t know what the exact right beginning is.

What kind of ending is good? That depends on the kind of story you want to tell, and there’s no formula that guarantees success. Many kinds of endings are satisfying: happy or sad, open or closed, philosophical or explicit, a twist or a freeze-frame, a summation or a flash-forward…

However, problems with endings almost always start somewhere earlier in the story. The conflict might be too small, too easily solved, or lacking tension. The antagonist might not be worthy. The problem, question, or conflict might not get resolved in the story, so the story doesn’t reach its actual end. Or the ending was reached earlier, and the story continued past the end. The ending may be unforeshadowed, rushed, unresolved, formulaic, illogical, abrupt, or unclear.

How do you know if you have a good ending, and if it’s not, then what’s the problem? One way to know is to set the work aside for as long as you can. I’ve heard of writers who wait for a full year. (I’m not that patient. Also, I might have deadlines.) Another way is to get good beta-readers, although they’re hard to find, and if you get some, treat them like royalty. A third way is to dissect your story. If you’re a pantser, now is the time to unleash your inner plotter and outline the story you have: you can see a lot by breaking it into its most skeletal form. If you’re a plotter, try reading it strictly for pleasure and notice what you enjoy and what bothers you.

Remember that writing is a practice discipline, like music or sports. The more you write, the better you get at it. The more you read, the more you’ll learn about writing, too, but be sure to read quality writing so you learn good lessons. Finally, beta-reading other people’s work is an effective way to learn to spot strengths and weaknesses in their writing, which will help you spot the same things in your own writing. Be sure to critique with kind and gentle honesty.

Have I reached a good ending to this blog post? I don’t think so. There’s a lot more to say. For starters, Rebecca Makkai has written a six-part series about endings on her Substack that explores many specific ways to end a story — wonderful, creative possibilities you can use.

If you want to write, I want you to succeed. I hope I helped a little.