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The How’s and Why’s of Outlining

The How’s and Why’s of Outlining

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Outling your novelHello everyone. I’m Jon Sprunk and I’m an outline-a-holic.

I used to be a write-by-the-seat-of-my-pants – or pantser – once upon a time. After many false starts, I even managed to finally complete a novel manuscript with that method, although it took me nearly four years to revise it into something I could submit.

So that’s my first reason. Outlining has greatly cut down on my revision time. When I was pantsing it, I never had much idea about where the story was going beyond a vague notion about the main characters and their basic conflict. And so, after the first draft I had a huge pile of… well, stuff… and my next job was to sift through it for a coherent and consistent story. I had many scenes I couldn’t use, at least not in their original form, and many spots where I needed to go back and write new scenes to fill crucial gaps in the story. Not that I don’t still need to do those things as an outliner, but far less often.

The second reason is work ethic. Part of the reason it took me so long to finish projects as a pantser was that I’m the type of person who needs a plan in order to stay on-task. When I was just winging it, it was too easy to blow off the writing on any given day because it felt like an endless project. I need to see my progress, and word count is too abstract when I have no idea if my story would end up being 50,000 words or 500,000.

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Come Into Callahan’s, Said the Spider

Come Into Callahan’s, Said the Spider

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CallahansI first met Jake (the narrator), Fast Eddie (the piano player), Doc Webster, Long Drink McGonnigle, and Mike Callahan himself in the pages of Analog. All of Spider Robinson’s stories were eventually collected in three anthologies: Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, Time Travelers Strictly Cash, and Callahan’s Secret.

Callahan’s is a place where the day after Monday is Punday, Wednesday is Tall Tales Night, there’s a Fireside Fillmore night, and a Riddles Night. And in the grand tradition of the bar story, we get told these tall tales, we’re given the lyrics of the songs, and we can even participate in the guessing of the riddles.

But unlike the traditional bar story, these are just window-dressing, Robinson’s homage to the conventions. The real stories are what happens around, during and after all this traditional bar story action. And these are anything but traditional – they are, after all, science fiction stories, and the characters who come into Callahan’s for help are time-travelers, aliens, humans suffering from strange mutations . . . and a talking dog.

Though the prefaces, intros, and afterwords establish the pretense that Callahan’s actually exists, it’s clearly in either an alternate universe or an alternate timeline. The second story in CCS, for example, “The Time Traveler,” was written, or at least appeared, in 1973 or ’74. Not too long after that, in “The Law of Conservation of Pain,” a time traveler appears from the year 1995, using the first time machine.

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John D. MacDonald: A Writer’s Writer

John D. MacDonald: A Writer’s Writer

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MacDonald_Typewriter
That thing he’s using is called a ‘typewriter’

“With sufficient funds to cover four months’ living expenses, he set out and wrote at an incredible pace, providing eight hundred thousand words. Writing for a wide variety of magazines, he kept more than thirty stories in the mail constantly, not giving up on a story until it had been rejected by at least ten markets

In the process he accumulated almost a thousand rejection slips after five months of effort. During this period, MacDonald worked fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, literally learning his craft and gaining the experience of a decade as he went along, which was important for a man who made no serious attempt to write until he was thirty.”

– Martin H. Greenberg, in the introduction to Other Times, Other Worlds.

That is how John D. MacDonald, thirty years old, fresh out of the military in 1946 and with one published short story (which he actually sent to his wife in a letter: she submitted it to a magazine) learned the craft of fiction writing.

One of America’s finest writers (note: I didn’t qualify that with the word ‘fiction’) set himself upon a course that no sane person would have undertaken in that situation.

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Compiling The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure

Compiling The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure

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The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure-smallGreetings, Black Gate readers! You may be familiar with my work as the game designer Lawrence Schick – possibly from role-playing material like the White Plume Mountain D&D scenario, video games such as Sword of the Samurai, or my recent work as Loremaster for The Elder Scrolls Online.

But I also write, edit, and translate historical fiction as Lawrence Ellsworth, and in that capacity I have a new title coming out from Pegasus Books, an anthology called The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure. Our friends at Black Gate asked me to write an article about compiling that anthology, and here it is.

I’ve been reading and collecting swashbuckling adventure fiction for many years – my whole life, really. A couple years ago, while in the middle of a long (and still uncompleted) translation project, it occurred to me that I probably knew enough about the subject to be able to compile a pretty interesting anthology. The more I thought about the idea, the better I liked it, so I sat down and starting making notes.

I decided the anthology had to meet four criteria. First, it would need to catch the attention of contemporary readers, which meant including recognizable, marquee names, of both characters and authors. Second, it would have to be attractive to mainstream publishers, which meant inexpensive to produce (works in the public domain), and couched in a familiar, saleable format – in this case, a “Big Book,” a fat collection of at least 200,000 words. Third, for variety I wanted a good mix of pirates, cavaliers, and outlaws – and they all had to be cracking good stories that would hold the attention of modern readers. Fourth, not just any stories would do – I wanted carefully hand-picked works that weren’t overly familiar and would re-introduce some of my favorite forgotten authors to the 21st century.

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Meet You In The Bar

Meet You In The Bar

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talesLast week I introduced the topic of the bar story and I saw from the comments that I struck a popular chord.

As I mentioned, the bar story is an example of a framing device, a literary tool which enables a writer to link a series of stories, in this case by having them told by people who have gathered together in a bar. The question of whether the “club story” qualified as a “bar story” came up, and on thinking it over, I realized that it did. For purposes of tale-telling – to say nothing of drinking – one’s club is essentially the same as one’s local.

This week, I’d like to talk in a little more depth about the anthologies edited by George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer, Tales From The Spaceport Bar (1987) and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (1989).

As they tell us in the preface to Tales,  the editors were inspired to collect these stories by what they call “that magnificent old cliché with chairs” the spaceport bar – as depicted in the scene from Star Wars (Episode IV, for those of you who weren’t around at the time). The preface also gives us a more detailed history of the sub-genre of “bar story” than I gave you last week.

I think we can all agree, however, that the important contents here are the 22 stories, not the preface. Many, if not most, of the stories are examples of framework “bar stories”, like Larry Niven’s “The Green Marauder” from his Draco’s Tavern series, “Elephas Frumenti” from the Gavagan’s Bar series of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, “Strategy at the Billiards Club” from Lord Dunsany’s Joseph Jorkin series, or Spider Robinson’s “The Centipede’s Dilemna” from Callahan’s Bar.

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The Joy of Outlining

The Joy of Outlining

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Final Cover-255
My name is M Harold Page, and I’m an outliner!

My name is M Harold Page and I’m an outliner!

Some creative writing forums greet this kind of statement with all the dismay of children being reminded there’s homework to do:

Only writing in flow — “pantsing” — is creative! Outlining is dull, hard work and mechanistic! Etc. Etc. (Oh the angst! I am blocked again…)

The “hard work” whinge just tells me people don’t know how to type. Writers type. If you can’t touch type, go learn.  Touch typing liberates you to treat your text as disposable — to casually “murder your darlings” — takes the physical grind out of writing — which has to be one of the real causes of the dreaded “Resistance” — and enables you to use outlining tools without begrudging every keystroke.

As for the creativity. Let me show not tell.

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How Much Backstory Do We Really Need?

How Much Backstory Do We Really Need?

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Writing backstoryNovels can depict events that take place over a span of generations or just a couple hours. Yet no matter how long a time period your story covers, there is always something that came before it. Those events that impact the storyline are called backstory.

Many aspects of backstory can be inferred by the reader. For example, if your main character is a cop, most readers will understand that she knows police procedure, the laws of her jurisdiction, and how to handle a firearm. You don’t need to walk us through every day of her academy training to tell us this (although writers will happily do so). However, the more of a character’s past that you tell your readers, the more they can identify with her.

Backstory is one of those things that, when done right, is almost seamless. You don’t even notice it. But when it’s done with a clumsy hand… well, it can be obnoxious.

The flow of information from the writer to the reader is like a dance. A striptease, actually. Of course, the reader wants to see the goods right away, but on some level they also want to be teased, to have it parceled out in little bits that leave them wanting more.

So how do we accomplish this? If you’ve spent any time around writers, writing courses, or online writing forums, you’ve no doubt heard of the dreaded information dump. Or infodump, for short. Big lumps of raw backstory dumped into the narrative are no longer in style (if they ever truly were). They bog down the narrative and distract from the main story. Today’s author must disguise the backstory within other techniques.

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An Age of Alternate Worlds Where Vampires and Zombies Prowl: Salman Rushdie on Fantasy

An Age of Alternate Worlds Where Vampires and Zombies Prowl: Salman Rushdie on Fantasy

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One Hundred Year of Solitude-smallI was reading Salman Rushdie’s cover article in the Sunday issue of The New York Times Book Review yesterday when I stumbled on a fascinating quote.

Rushdie’s article, “Magic in Service of Truth,” isn’t really about fantasy — not directly, anyway. It’s a tribute to the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, and especially the setting of his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Márquez, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, died on April 17th, and Rushdie’s article is a thoughtful look back at the career of the man whom the President of Colombia recently called “the greatest Colombian who ever lived.”

But Rushdie’s article is fascinating for other reasons as well. He is one of the most respected writers of the 21st Century — indeed, for several months after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, and the fatwā issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, he was perhaps the most famous author on the planet — and in the midst of his tribute to Márquez, he casually admits we are living in a literary Age of Fantasy.

We live in an age of invented, alternate worlds. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Rowling’s Hogwarts, the dystopic universe of The Hunger Games, the places where vampires and zombies prowl: These places are having their day. Yet in spite of the vogue for fantasy fiction, in the finest of literature’s fictional microcosms there is more truth than fantasy. In William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi and, yes, the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez, imagination is used to enrich reality, not to escape from it.

Rushdie has written a fantasy or two of his own, including his first novel Grimus (1975) and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). He was knighted in 2007.

I read the article in in the newsprint edition, but you can read it online here.

So We Were In This Bar . . .

So We Were In This Bar . . .

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White HartThere’s a long tradition in western literature of the “framing device” – think Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales … or the Thousand Nights and a Night if we want something more obviously in our genre. Or Asimov and his Black Widower Mysteries.

My personal favourite among short story framing devices, however, is the bar story -– and I don’t mean the kind that starts, “We were in this bar…” Though, come to think of it, that’s how all my vacation stories start. Hmmm.

The device itself is fairly straightforward. The bar is a gathering place of disparate, but like-minded, people who exchange stories and anecdotes, usually involving people not present at the time. Sometimes the patrons of the bar take turns telling tales and sometimes, as with PG Wodehouse’s collections Meet Mr. Mulliner and Mr. Mulliner Speaks, one person in particular is the storyteller.

Undoubtedly because the storytellers are in a bar, the stories themselves can get a bit far-fetched, leading to such well-known formats as the Shaggy Dog Story and even the Tall Tale itself.

Which seems tailor-made for SF and Fantasy stories, don’t you think?

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The Thrill of Writing, the Agony of Revision

The Thrill of Writing, the Agony of Revision

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Revising cartoon-smallComposing a new story, especially a novel, is a thrilling experience filled with highs and lows, slow days and fast ones, sweat and tears (and occasionally a little blood). In a lot of ways, the writing is the “fun part” of being an author. However, that wonderful time is always followed by the worst part of being a writer.

Revision.

All right, I’m being a little hyperbolic. Revision isn’t all bad. It’s certainly a challenge to take a pile of words and try to shape them into something that sort of resembles art, or at least an interesting story. But it’s also a lot of work. And, for me, the worst part is getting started.

Right after I finish the first draft of a manuscript, I put it away for a couple weeks. The goal is to forget what I wrote as much as possible so that when I sit down with it again, I can attempt to see it with fresh eyes. But here’s the problem. There is an immutable law of writing that first drafts always suck. Always. There was a time when I didn’t think so, when I thought my first drafts were pretty damned good. Yeah, I was too stupid to know better.

Now that my blissful ignorance has worn off, I approach these “first re-reads” of a manuscript with equal parts of excitement and dread. And the excitement part evaporates quickly after reading the first few pages, leaving me with only dread, growing over my head like a cloud of impenetrable darkness as I wade deeper and deeper in to the morass which I’d like to think has the potential to be a decent novel.

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