I am seriously considering this again, and the only thing that makes me more hopeful than the last two years is that I've been having a lot of fun writing little bits and pieces of fiction over on the Novitas forums as an extension of LARP. It feels nice to be writing again, but weird, like rediscovering that younger version of myself who had more free time and possibly less friends, but certainly more opportunity and brain space to sit and write.

The problem with me is that I like to spread the writing out over hours. I'll write a scene, I'll check my e-mail, livejournal, and the forums, write another paragraph or two, play a game of solitaire, pick at the page some more, get a snack, make some tea, write again, and so on. It's a mode of being. It's the business that regularly kept me up until 3 or 4am during college when I was writing a paper. It's a part of the process for me.

However, it's not only inefficient, it's impractical while working full-time and having "shit to do." Who has time to putz to let creativity simmer when there are dishes and laundry and dinner to be made and Netflix and electrical problems and, and, and...

It also makes me a lousy human being to live with or interact with, and can be impossible while not living alone. It's an active choice to temporarily ignore the real humans in my life for the paper ones. The last few years I started NaNo, part of my commitment problem was that I decided that I didn't want to ignore the real people.

I need to find a happy medium between the two if I'm going to make it work this year. For that lesson, I'm willing to not finish, so long as I learn how to start the balancing act.

I don't have work today and Justin is at class, so my goal is to make some plot notes and get some characters designed so I have a place to jump off from.

Other than both being writers, my friend John and I are very different. While I waffle back and forth and treat my writing like a hobby which I fit in around other commitments, John is a full-time writer, working on book one of a five-book epic, and currently living off the wages his girlfriend makes. He also has a lot of different ideas about process, ideas to be pursued, structure, editing, craft, plot, etc. So when we get onto writing talk there is invariably some very opinionated discussion.

I was talking with him last night about our respective books-in-progress and we got to the subject of endings, specifically morals/messages in the conclusion. John once told me he always wrote with a moral in mind. "Otherwise, what's the point?" he said. We were both taking a children's writing class, and I was writing a very fun piece about pirates with no discernable moral whatsoever, and possibly no point other than an adventure. But for whatever reason, I've sort of switched my tactics and I approached both my NaNo novels with a premise in mind that was, at least in the beginning, stronger and more solid than the plot. And while I can't say they strictly give morals, they do point to a way of thinking. Switch's main theme is seizing control of your own life and making it into what you want it to be. This year's one is about family: the physical and habitual traits that make a unit and what makes it work. In both of them, there's other stuff going on, but there was a main idea pushing me in the right direction. Sort of like an essay point made through plot.

In keeping with this new[er] way I'm working, and his prior statement about morals being the entire point, I asked him what his premise or moral was for the epic. It was a weird conversation because I think we were talking at cross purposes. He said there were too many to count, and lots of his opinions and different world views, and things he claimed could not be resolved. "People believe what they want to believe. It's all philosophical debate." I argue that it's the writer's job, as they plot out the story, to make a case for the one point of view they believe. "Your characters may never agree on it or have an aha moment, and some of your readers might not agree, but event A, B, and C are going to show cause and effect, and your effects and outcomes show your opinions."

Here's where things got convoluted. "Julie, honestly, you can't think of everything as a structure. You always have, ever since I've known you. All I care about is the story and character building. When things fit into a structure, it's pure accident. I mean, A might effect B, or it might not, either way, the reader is left to think." I ignored the structure jibe and after we discussed it further for a while, I rephrased my question. "When your reader gets to the end of the last book and puts it down, what is the most important thing they are going to be left thinking about?" He said he's writing high fantasy, so it's not supposed to have a "Fight Club" ending.

Now, I know the type of stories I'm working on now aren't the be all and end all of styles. And there is a place for the Fight Club stories and the adventure stories and everything in between. But even if the conclusion is only "good triumphs over evil," surely there has to be SOME endpoint?

In response to some questions about outlining posted by aidenfire:

Different stories come to me in different ways. The most successful outline I have ever done and actually found useful was one I wrote when I was so busy with my life that I didn't have time to write, so I would write notes to myself instead. And by the time I actually had time to sit and write, I was so excited I whizzed through the story based on my notes. And I think the plot was tighter for having been outlined, because I only wrote the key scenes. (My writing critique group at the time said, though, that they felt like they were reading the highlights or excerpts from a novel... and ultimately I think it might have been TOO streamlined.)

Other than that, I do try to keep notes if I come up with a particularly brilliant idea, but I rarely do an outline. I think that if you are the type of person who doesn't get bored with the story idea once you know what is going to happen (I can be guilty of this), then outlining is a good idea. If you don't - well, that is what multiple drafts are for. I didn't use an outline or any preplanning for last year's NaNoWriMo, and I did manage to write all 50k. However, I have a lot of extra crap in the novel that won't be in it when I write the next draft. I could probably have saved myself the headache of writing so much extra fluff if I had known the story when I started out. There are extraneous scenes, and there is at least one point where I went off in the wrong direction. Others are scenes of nothing but exposition as I figured out the rules to the fantasy world I was creating, and all that has to go, too, or at least be recycled.

Ultimately I don't think that whether or not you outline will affect the story if you are a good writer/editor. Outlining is a tool for you. If you can successfully manipulate that tool, it should help you to cut down on the number of drafts you do, because pre-planning gets you closer to the finished product on the first draft. It's like the outline, which took a lot of thought but not a lot of effort, was your first draft, and you worked out the kinks in it. Your real first draft has theoretically got the polish of a second draft. So if you don't outline, there is just likely to be more stuff to trim and alter. You have to do the work one way or another.

Ultimately I want to train myself to use a very loose outline so that I don't get stuck on a story or write useless things. I've tried notecarding, but haven't gotten around to using the notes I made for myself yet. I am still trying to figure out a system that will work for me.

I guess that's the real point: do what works for you. It's tough to figure out what works best for you, though, when you're still learning and organizing your habits... and I am still in that boat.

----

One of the most interesting questions she asks (to me anyway) is "Can you tell when a story has been outlined or not? Do you think that, in general, outlining affects the quality of a story?" I never really thought about it... I know it affects the quality of the first draft, and the ease of editing that draft. I can't tell, nor have I ever speculated, on whether or not an author used outlines. I have never blamed a bad, slow, or holey plot on the author's outline. Maybe I should?

I found this in response to a question about whether to outline, and here is what a person named wondersheep posted.

I can tell you in five seconds if you should do an outline or not, just by your answer to this simple question:

Did you ever use those notes you took in school to study for tests:

If your answer is:

a) YES! OMG! ALL THE TIME! I even color coded them! -- write a detailed outline in October.

b) Well, most of the time I at least looked them over before a test -- scribble down some notes as they come to you in October.

c) What the hell? Are you kidding? -- make some notes in November as you go along.

Heh, I actually find this really helpful! I'm a B person myself, so I always waffle on whether I need one or not. So perhaps it will help one of you, too.

I guess that means I should sketch out an outline for something in the next few weeks... hmm.

Saturday at the laundromat we came up with a couple of character concepts and a plot that might work for our map. It's neat to be linking possibilities to the places. It brought out more specifics about our world and how people live in it. Random bits and pieces that we put together about cause and effect became important plot points. I think it's going to work.

Justin voted we keep this rough outline and work on a couple more with this world in mind. Now that I think about it again, I am not sure if he meant other plots going concurrently to this one, or different variations on the same world. I think the latter. It'll give us choices to pursue different things when we actually sit down to write.

It went pretty well and I think we're both fairly happy with what we came up with. I don't know what more to say about it without giving anything away.

Something I am starting to note as I work my way through plotting and replotting is that any place where the story gets rough or starts to drag was a place where I made the wrong decision on where to go next.

I don't mean to suggest that I wish I'd stopped until I worked it out. Instead, approaching problem areas with this in mind should help me: if something isn't working, change it - don't rewrite the damn thing in an equally awful way. They say it is a mark of insanity to do the same thing over and over and expect different results, and that is pretty much what I am trying to avoid.

It's taking a while to hit on the plot points I need to make things smooth out again. Some of them were easier than others, like little tweaks to the length of time that something took place, an altered order of events, or extra scenes. Others should have been more obvious but still took a long time because it required altering my mindset (i.e., if character X's past is totally uninteresting to write about, recreate it).

I think if I were the type of person who worked with outlines and plot maps I could have solved some of these problems before I wrote 50,000 and some odd words. I'm not sure, though. It is easier to see the weaknesses now that I have something down solid.

I am hoping that when I have completed my note cards I will really know where I am going and have solved most of the plot pits. But since I haven't written much about some of the characters I really want to strengthen, I am not so sure I won't do them wrong the first shot. My goal, though, is to produce something that won't embarass me, even if it is wrong. I knew I would be throwing something together hodge-podge for NaNo, but now I want something clean enough to pass out for advice.

I am getting ahead of myself now, though. Monday or Tuesday I am going to start writing from the beginning based on my notes. (The day depends on whether or not I skip training Monday night and how precious my time between work and training becomes.)

My goal (for writemore) is to do 4k a week. Even if my week is very rough it should be possible to complete my word goal, since my best day during NaNo was 5 or 6k.

So, I have more note cards to do and I should spread them all out and see what I have. Justin won't be here until very late tonight so I have a few hours to kill. (And an article to write... d'oh.)

Today and yesterday I worked on an outline (on paper in my blue editing pencil) for the first few chapters of Switch. And then I remembered that I had considered altering the structure to develop all three girls simultaneously, whereas most of the plot as it stands now follows Cassandra (apart from a few random scenes). I still think developing them all would be a really good idea, but right now Alexes and Claudia are more like tools than stars. I haven't thought it through enough yet.

Actually, in the first draft Alexes dramatically changes personality from beginning to end, with no scenes in between to explain it. Claudia's personality is not attempted because she does not actually make an appearance; we only hear about her from others. They are both pretty pathetic and underworked, whether or not I give them narrating powers.

I am also trying to get a sense of how I should structure my chapters. I see things in a very linear fashion when I am planning them out, so that I write scene by scene and leave the scene to putter out when I run out of things to say. Obviously this is not very effective dramatically. So right now I am looking at the plot and seeing what hooks and cliffhangers I can end chapters at. This is going to be the most useful part of outlining for me because I just don't have a sense for it without plotting it out line by line. I am considering putting the key scenes on note cards and then shuffling them around to see what I can come up with--especially if I decide to do all three starring characters. Or perhaps I'll go back through my notes from that SCBWI meeting where an author showed us a page-by-page plot map. That should be interesting, too, because I would also be able to see what I emphasized with longer sections and what got clipped short.