How I Outline

I start with 40 unwritten scenes.

For me, this exists in 2 places: An RTF file in the virtual folder I have created for my novel on my computer, and a physical folder that holds 40 blank, college-ruled notebook pages.  The folder is one of those with the brads in the spine, so I can change out the pages when I rewrite a scene or re-organize scenes.

Stephen King describes the process of writing as archaeology: You uncover more and more of the story as you go, sometimes using the most delicate brushes to get at the finer bits.  I think of writing more like standing in a vast, open stadium with an infinite number of doors, and closing those doors until they shape a corridor along which your story moves from start to end.

I am in no way debating Stephen King because he is Stephen-fricking-KING and I am...who exactly?  I buy his novels the moment they are released; NO ONE has yet to buy one of my novels -- because they don't exist.  (Well, if you are reading this in my Future, maybe you bought my novel and liked it enough to check out this blog.  But as I write this now, I am unpublished.  This novel I'm blogging on is meant to be my first publication.)

To explain my doorway-filled-stadium construct a little better, imagine you are in a stadium filled with doorway cubicles.  The doorways are wide enough that you can see from one end of the stadium to the other in 360 degrees.  You can pass, without the slightest inconvenience, from one end of the stadium to the other in any direction.  You could throw a sheet over your head and run around like a madman and only bump into a few door frames.

I'm saying that you have options.

Too many options.

This, to me, is the story concept.

Now, when you come up with the concept, the concept itself naturally closes some of the doors, beginning to define the space.  Usually, one of my story concepts closes most of the doors at one end of the stadium, creating a specific Beginning corridor.  And the shape of the Beginning corridor dictates that several (not many, but several) of the doors at the other end of the stadium shut, creating a vague Ending corridor.  (Still too many doors open, too many directions the reader can wander off in.  But the shape is solid enough to give me a destination and open enough to allow me (too many) options.)

My job as a storyteller is to create an exciting corridor from the Beginning of my story to the Ending.  In my imagination, it's like those spook houses that open around Halloween: They take a warehouse, create walls out of plywood and black plastic, and craft a path from the beginning of the spook house to the end, filling each pocket with gory scenes and providing holes in the walls where costumed employees can jump out and scare you.

I want to create the most thrilling path through this hypothetical stadium, so those who walk my corridor come out the other side having enjoyed an entertaining (and hopefully moving and thought-provoking) journey.

40 blank scenes gives me my theoretical stadium.  Now I need to begin shutting theoretical doors.

For this novel, I want to put the reader in the world first -- tone, time, place, a glimpse of the overall Story Question, etc. -- so I know I won't be able to come up with Scene 1 until after I have done a little development on the story proper.  (This is the Murder Mystery type Opening, where the reader witnesses the crime, but doesn't meet the Protagonist yet.)

I also know that Scene 40, my "Resolution" or "Denouement" scene, is going to occur after the final, defining piece of dramatic action.

So that means my dramatic Climax will occur in Scene 38 and Scene 39.  My protagonist will attempt to solve the problem in Scene 38, but fail, but she will actually figure out the solution and enact it in Scene 39. (I always love the quick "1-2 Punch" at the end of a long story, so I am going to try to utilize that.)

Okay, so Scene 1 will be a teaser, Scene 2 will be a "Meet the Hero" scene, Scene 3 will be a "Call To Action" scene (gangking some "Monomyth" terminology there), Scene 38 will be the Protagonist's "Almost Won" scene, Scene 39 will be the "Actually Won" scene, and Scene 40 will reveal how the Protagonist has been changed by her adventure and grown as a person.

NOTE: If this layout causes you to want to accuse me of being "formulaic" or "a sell-out" or whatever, please stop reading here, leave a nasty comment at the bottom, and don't bother yourself with me or my work ever again.  I'm with Gene Simmons when people have accused KISS of being "sell-outs": to paraphrase, "You're damn right!  Our shows sell out every night!"  It's about perspective: I don't want to spend a month (I'm a slow reader) traveling with people I have come to love, then watch them fail.  I want to see them suffer and overcome, I want to see them realize their personal shortcomings and grow, I will even mourn those who die and move on with the survivors.  But I will not willingly pay money to watch them fail.  So why on Earth would I ever write such a story?  The only reason would be to impress a small (though, granted, vocal) minority who seem to believe that the only Truth is nihilism.  I am not a  nihilist, and my personal experiences have proven, for me, quite the opposite so far.  So for me to write a nihilistic ending would be dishonest.  It would be betraying Truth as I experience it.  It would be pandering.  It would be selling out.  Sermon over.


Some doors in my metaphorical stadium firmly closed, some partially closed, but FAR TOO MANY still wide open!

However...

I have a tool in my toolbox that will close a few more doors and help further shape my stadium!  :D

STRUCTURE!

If you've done any study of screenwriting, you're familiar with Syd Field's classic Three-Act Structure.  Roughly outlined, this delineates the first quarter of the story as Act I, the last quarter of the story as Act III, and the middle half as Act II.  Act I is "the Setup", Act II is "the Confrontation" and Act III is "the Resolution".   And there is a "Mid-point" dividing Act II into halves.

The Three-Act Structure has served screenwriters, producers, directors and movie editors well since 1979.  But, in my opinion, it is only the beginning of story-development wisdom.

The Three-Act Structure is useful because it closes some of those doors in my theoretical stadium, and it closes them in relationship to each other -- meaning that you know where you start, open space until you get to the first act-break, more open space until you get to the mid-point, then more open space until you get to the second act-break, then open space until you get to the end.  And that's IMMENSELY helpful when you're starring at a lot of blank pages!

Also, the Three-Act Structure provides the newbie with a really useful perspective: You can spend a quarter of your story setting up the story's dilemma, and a quarter of the story resolving it.  If this is your first novel, that gives you a lot of comfortable leeway!

However, I sense that current movies and novels (let's say, 2000 to 2014) have moved more into a Five- or Six-Act Structure.

This is about contemporary pacing, I think.  Stories -- be they Big Screen, Small Screen or Novel -- move faster, because audiences catch on more quickly.  Have you seen IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE recently?  How annoying is is that George Bailey takes SO LONG to figure out that Clarence is telling him the exact, literal truth?!  Back in 1946, mainstream audiences couldn't buy into such a fantastical premise, so the Protagonist needed to be as skeptical and disbelieving as they, no doubt, were.  But today?  You see department store mannequins inexplicably coming after you, a stranger grabs your hand and says, "Run", and you do!  You see his police box, see it's bigger on the inside than on the outside, exit and run around the outside of the box to confirm what your senses are telling you, then you just deal with it.

If you wrote a novel today that took as long for the Protagonist to accept his situation as George Bailey takes to accept his, your readers might very well close the book and never open it.  We have been exposed to an astounding array of concepts and scenarios, and we don't need a quarter of a novel or screenplay to buy into it.  We're reading (or watching), then we already buy into it.  What we want is MORE STORY.

So because I want to write the types of stories I want to read, I have adopted a 6-Act structure for this novel.

ACT I - Protagonist is asked to solve a mystery for a cherished friend.  Protagonist isn't even sure there is any legitimacy in the claims, but because of his emotional commitment to his friend, he agrees to investigate.

ACT II - After preliminary investigations, the Protagonist isn't sure there's a legitimate mystery to investigate, but he can't admit this to his friend.

ACT III - The mystery is legitimate!  There IS something here worth investigating!  (The Protagonist is relieved and excited to discover this.)

ACT IV - Protagonist learns that the subject of investigation has been holding back evidence and wants them off the case!  The Protagonist is free to quit the case, only he can't now.

ACT V - The Protagonist has figured out enough of the case to know that there IS a legitimate mystery, and what the subject of the investigation feared to be true is a misconception!  When the protagonist solves the case, all parties will be exonerated!

ACT VI - The Protagonist sorts it all out.

For the sake of full-disclosure here, I nicked this structure from an episode of a TV Mystery series.  I'm not stealing any of the specific story details, I am simply "borrowing" the story "shape", if you will.  (And I have even altered the "shape" for my story's purposes.)  I am not advocating plagiarism in the slightest, but I point this out because you will find "there is nothing new under the sun", and you can "stand on the shoulders of giants" to fill those blank pages.  How many times has A CHRISTMAS CAROL or a Shakespeare play been "adapted"?  That's legal because those are in the Public Domain.  But you could also argue that Han Solo is Rick from CASABLANCA in a Sci-Fi setting.  Does that detract from either creation? Do you love Solo less?  Or Rick, for that matter?  They are different enough that they are their own, separate beings.  Plus, if you intentionally created characters and situations that HAD NEVER been used before in any form, your story would likely be so unfamiliar to audiences that they wouldn't be able to relate.  (Try to imagine a story in which Barry the Bell-taper has to nox a magical pidgeot 37 times before the All Beacon's Eve ends and the fairy doors are all closed.  Highly original story, but I doubt it sells very well in any medium.  What's a bell-tapper?  Why is it its own vocation, or avocation, whichever?  What's a pidgeot and how does one nox it?  Why would one want to nox it?  What happens if Barry only noxes it 36 times?  Or what if he noxes it 38 times?  You get the idea.)

Plus, even if you only based your stories on real-life people and events, you're sill gangking from real-life, right?

So what I'm advocating here, in the name of expedience and not letting yourself talk yourself out of writing your story, is allowing yourself to borrow GENERAL aspects from other stories (basic character traits, basic story strictures, basic story dilemmas, etc.), while avoiding-at-all-costs actually STEALING another writer's work.

I think the core of this idea is best expressed by renowned and beloved poet T. S. Elliot:

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal;
bad poets deface what they take,
and good poets make it into something better,
or at least something different.
The good poet welds his theft into
a whole of feeling which is unique,
utterly different than that from which it is torn;
the bad poet throws it into something
which has no cohesion.
A good poet will usually borrow from authors
remote in time, or alien in language,
or diverse in interest."

- T. S. Eliiot

I think if you understand this quote, you have an idea about what I mean about "borrowing".  Moreover, you have an internal barometer that lets you know if you're crossing a moral line.  Moreover still, if your story is too much like anyone else's story, you KNOW there are people out there just waiting to POUNCE on your work as soon as it is published, declaiming you a plagiarist and unoriginal and a hack!

So when considering borrowing (or stealing),keep in mind that this is a very small world now, and people have unprecedented access to past and present works of fiction, and people online seem to LOVE to find flaws in ANYTHING.  (I read a Comment war wherein a website regular declared that the initial PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN trilogy was a rip-off of the original STAR WARS trilogy.  And even as the writers of the PIRATES screenplays explained where they were coming from when they created all the characters and situations, the commentator stubbornly held his position, post after post, until he finally stopped commenting and disappeared.  So even if you don't plagiarize, you are likely to be accused of it; knowing this, it's best to steer as far away from actual plagiarism as humanly possible.)

All this said, I borrowed a structure from a TV Mystery series that closes 4 additional sets of door in my hypothetical stadium.

Just doing this mathematically, here's how it plays out:

I know Scenes 1-3.

I know Scenes 38-40.

Now, because of my adopted structure, I know Scene 9, and...

I know Scene 16, and...

I know Scene 23, and...

I know Scene 30.

That's 10 scenes out of 40 I now know (maybe not in detail, but in nature) because of this structure tool!  :)

Whether you're "borrowing" a structure or creating one on your own, another extremely helpful tool to consider is Robert McKee's Emotional Value Charge tool.

McKee observes that un-fulfilling stories flow from Negative Emotional Value Charge to Positive Emotional Value Charge.

In other words: "Protagonist is lonely" flows directly to "Protagonist finds love".  Or "a boxer is a loser" flows directly to "a boxer is a winner".  Or "cybernetic bounty hunter seeking quasi-supernatural serial killer" flows directly to "cybernetic bounty hunter kills quasi-supernatural serial killer".

I once read a speculative screenplay (he never sold it) by a super-talented friend which brought tears to my eyes by how awesome the ending was!  (I don't generally cry about sad stuff, but I unabashedly bawl my eyes out at beauty.)  The only issue with the script is that it was 120 pages and it felt like a 30-page short.  In one way, you could say that it was too long, but the story needed every single story beat to create the emotion you felt at the end.  Take out 90 pages of script, and you don't get the same emotional impact.

The actual problem with the screenplay is that it created a straight-line corridor from the Beginning to the Ending.  You (the reader) travel in a straight line, with no meandering to the left or to the right.  You know exactly where you're going, and you get there, and it works gangbusters... but... you're not really fulfilled by the journey.

So in his seminal and essential book on writing STORY: SUBSTANCE, STRUCTURE, STYLE, AND THE PRINCIPLES OF SCREENWRITING, Robert McKee gives us the Emotional Value Charge tool.

Positive Value Charge:
Contrary Value Charge:
Negative Value Charge:
End of the Line Charge:

So let's say your hero is the boxer who wants to be a winner.  "Winner" is most likely our Positive value charge.  That naturally makes Loser our Negative value charge.

But McKee observes that there is more area to be explored than just the polar opposites.  He suggests there is the Contrary value charge -- which is neither value, but a state of emotion that is not preferable for the Protagonist -- and there is what McKee terms the "negation of the negation" -- a state that is actually worse than what the Protagonist fears, and emotional double-negative, if you will.  (If you haven't read it, you really should read Robert McKee's STORY.  I'm not going to attempt to go into detail about what he's talking about, but he explains it superbly.)

So our boxer isn't actually a loser when the story starts, but that's his biggest fear.  But his greatest aspiration is to be a winner.  The Contrary state can be where he starts out, or it can be a level he sinks to after he sets out on his journey.  Let's say the Contrary is "Friendless".

So we begin our story and the boxer is a nobody.  He has a few friends, but no one would call him a winner, and he stands a very real possibility of becoming a loser.  So he sets out to become a winner, and it's harder than he expected (naturally, because this is a story).  Early-ish in the story, something he does in his attempt to become a winner lands him in the position of losing all his friends.  (He -- and the reader -- now experiences the Contrary Emotional Value Charge.)

But our boxer perseveres.  (Because this is a story.)  But his efforts fall short and he becomes a legitimate loser.  (The Negative Value Charge.)  Wow!  The very thing we were hoping wouldn't happen HAS happened!  Where does our boxer go from here?

Well, this is a story and he's our Protagonist, so keeps going, naturally.  I mean, he's already realized his worst fear, so what does he have to lose?

The End of the Line Emotional Value Charge, of course.

This tool is AMAZING for early development!  It's ideal for really figuring out where your story is capable of going.  You start with a story problem, which is going to give you a direction in which your Protagonist naturally wants to go.  That's your Positive Emotional Value Charge, right?  Then the Negative Emotional Value Charge is, of course, the opposite emotion.  Easy enough.

The Contrary Emotional Value Charge is easy enough, too: It sucks, but not as badly as the Negative.  But it gives us a safe place to let our Protagonist fall to first, before we really bring the pain.

But even when we give the Protagonist (and the audience) the worst that they're imagining, we're really not.  We're holding back our Ace of Spades.

So what's the double-negative of being s loser?

Just off the top of my head, I'm going with "Loser Who Thinks He's A Winner".  (McKee talks about how a lot of times the Negative disguised as the Positive is often worse than the Negative by itself.  Again, you should totally read his book.)

So our boxer digs his way out of being a loser, and he finds himself in a situation where he can delude himself into thinking he has made it.  Maybe he always saw winners in hot cars and expensive clothes surrounded by an entourage.  So on his way to trying to be a winner he lucks out and gains the superficial trappings of "beings a winner".  He hasn't won yet, but he stumbles into a manager who can make him lots of money to lose.  And because of the money, cars and entourage, our boxer is convinced that he actually is a winner now!  Until he meets the champ, who doesn't have any respect for him because our boxer hasn't actually accomplished anything to merit his money, clothes and entourage.

Our Protagonist gets a nasty wake-up call and dig a little deeper.  Did he really want the trappings?  Or did he want the accomplishment?

And this, naturally, is all the motivation our boxer needs to go the rest of the way, actually BECOME a winner!

And you might notice that this tired premise of a boxer who wants to be a winner is suddenly much deeper and more compelling than when I first mentioned. it!

The premise seemed tired and boring to me, too, when I first typed it.  And it got a little more interesting when I came up with the Contrary Value Charge of "Friendless".  And it wasn't the "Loser Who Things He's A Winner" value charge that made it interesting for me, but when I figured out HOW TO ACCOMPLISH that story movement that I started thinking, "Hey, this is kind of okay now!"

I mean, I'm not going to write that story.  If I were, the boxer would have to become maybe a gladiator on a dystopian, distant Human colony on some far-flung planet, and he'd be forced to fight against maybe demons or something.  That might be worth writing to me.

But the point here is to simply illustrate the principle, and how it relates to developing a brand new story idea into an actual story.


So this boxer story-line might look something like this:

Scene 1 - Teaser
Scene 2 - Intro Boxer.
Scene 3 - Boxer wants to be a winner.
Scene 4 - Boxer sees how he can try to accomplish that.

Scene 9 - Because of Boxer's first, failed, attempt, he loses his few friends.

Scene 16 - TBA...Maybe this is where Boxer gets a chance to go after the Champ.

Scene 23 - Boxer realizes he is now, officially a loser.

Scene 30 - Boxer meets the Champ and realizes he's just a wealthy loser.

Scene 38 - Boxer remembers all he's been through to get here, and goes in for the kill.  But he's knocked down!
Scene 39 - Boxer summons last reserves, do or die, lands the punch, AND KNOCKS THE CHAMP OUT!
Scene 40 - Who is the Boxer now, after all he's been through?  How is is life better because he didn't give up?

Notice that instead of front-loading the heavy-duty story stuff, I back-load it.  You can't let your story be boring up front, but you really want to make sure you go out with a bang.  If you have to choose, save your best for later on (as late as possible, I would say, as a general rule of thumb) and just challenge yourself to come up with something great when it's time to fill that in.

Also notice that we can fill in more of the gaps -- the scene where, after losing, the Boxer meets the Promoter, the Boxer getting his first big payday, the Boxer spending his money and making superficial "friends", et. al.  I'm not going to place those scenes because I just want to give you an idea how using the Emotional Value Charge tool closes some of those theoretical doors for you when you're starting out with your outline.  It's easier to say "Okay, I need to figure out scenes 5-8", or "scenes 10-15", than it is to try to fill in scenes 5-37.

Your corridor is beginning to take shape!

Had I simply sat don with my Beginning and started writing, I might never have come up with the twists and turns I have now.

And besides, one thing screenwriters understand better than novelists is that writing isn't just the words one chooses to describe the action.  In fact, in screenwriting, having dazzling prose is a hindrance rather than an asset.  Because the writer's REAL work is the characters and the ideas, the situations and the choices the characters make.  A newbie novelist can easily forget this, lost in those jaw-dropping eloquent descriptions of things.  But no matter how wondrously you describe a garden, as far as story-progression goes, it's still just a garden.  If your characters aren't doing interesting things in that garden, the reader could probably not care less.

Outlining is writing.  It's setting the characters in motion.  And when I'm outlining, I am acutely aware that each and every scene has to be its own micro-story or else, no matter how eloquent my prose, that scene will feel flat.

So that's how I outline.

40 scenes.

I try to "close as many doors" as possible, as quickly as possible.  I want to narrow the gaps in my structure, filling up the empty scenes between my Beginning and my first act-break, or my second act-break and my Ending, etc.  (The cool thing about outlining, also, is that I don't have to do this in a linear fashion; when I get an idea for the middle, I stick it in there, then a scene at the end, then the beginning, then back to the middle, just whatever pops into my head first.)

Each scene needs to turn on what John Vorhaus calls a "Pivot", which is a change in the Protagonist's emotional state.  In other words, something has to happen in that scene.  No scene is static.  (This will also help me when I'm writing pages!  Even if I'm dead tired from my day job and I'm only writing because I have a deadline to meet, I can see where the scene starts and what the pivot is, and I have something to write!  No Writer's Block for Ray Jay!)

And this has been a loooooong blog entry, so I'm going away now.

I should probably work on my outline, too, come to think of it...