Planning for NaNoWriMo: Building an Outline – A Guest Blog from Karen Wiesner

Introductory note: How are you going to spend your NaNoWriMO? Write by the seat of your pants or plan a detailed outline? Stephanie is our resident write-by-the-seat-of-her-pants gal and she writes really well that way. I (Shonna) tried that last year and decided that this year I needed a little more planning. So I sought out the advice of a detailed outliner.

Karen Wiesner is the author of First Draft in 30 Days. As we head into NaNoWriMo many of you might be interested in learning how to prepare a solid outline that will help make writing 50,000 words in November a breeze. This week Karen will be filling in both Tues and Thurs Guest Blog spots to help us get a jump on our outlines. Then she will be back each Tuesday during NaNo to offer us some tips and encouragement.  

A Guest Blog from Karen Wiesner
http://www.karenwiesner.com  

The basic principle of NaNoWriMo and other just-get-it-down methods is completely against my own writing methods. But I bet you knew I was going to say that. Nevertheless, when Shonna Slayton asked me to guest blog here about using my outlining system (contained in my Writer’s Digest Book releases First Draft in 30 Days and From First Draft to Finished Novel {A Writer’s Guide to Cohesive Story Building}) in preparation for NaNoWriMo, I couldn’t resist participating.

To my way of thinking, just-get-it-done methods are like writing a novel backwards. Why write 175 pages, conceivably much more, of a novel that you’ll mostly likely have to scrap in part or in full when you can write a fully useable outline of a novel in a week or two? Doesn’t it make more sense to revise an outline until you’ve got a solid plot instead of going around and around through dozens of drafts of a book to find a solid plot? And, by utilizing a solid outline you’ve completed previously and then committing to NaNoWriMo to help you write the first draft based on that outline…wow, it’s all good! Write right from the start, and you’ll save yourself a ton of blood, sweat and tears to get something wonderful instead of something that will take you ten times as long to fix.

Let’s set forth the usual method used by most writers for getting to a manuscript written (especially if they’re following a just-get-it-down method without an outline): Little or no pre-writing on a novel is done. The author has an idea—an idea that may or may not be terribly well developed in his head. Generally, there’s a lot or a little brainstorming involved in this process. One day the author sits down and writes Chapter One. Now, if this author is a crash-and-burn type who doesn’t need to eat, sleep or leave the house, he could conceivably finish this novel in a short amount of time—maybe a month (like participants commit to with NaNoWriMo), possibly less. What does this author do now that he has that first draft? Well, now he starts on the hard part of this whole writing process. He got the easy part of the way and left himself with the torturous work of untangling, sorting out, revising and polishing up these 175 or more pages. You really do have to agree that working like this is unproductive, don’t you? I’d go so far as to say that these kind of author does 100% more work than he really needs to.

Now, let’s look at how the process of writing a novel should be in the ideal. You’ve spent a considerable amount of time—maybe, hopefully, even years—brainstorming on a particular idea for a story. You may have also written quite a few notes on this idea. You may have character, setting and plot worksheets all filled out. Maybe you’ve written detailed notes about beginning, middle and end scenes in the book. Now, it’s time put it all together in formal outline. You write Chapter One at the top of the page, set the scene, and you write a basic draft of what happens in that scene. You write Chapter Two at the top of a new page, set the scene, and you write a draft of what happens in that scene…and so on. You go as far as you can in the story, working your way chronologically from the beginning of the book to the end. When you can no longer work chronologically, you put in a few blank pages, and you skip around, working on scenes that will come in at some later point in the book, and so the middle and end of your book begin to gain some structure. As you’re working, all your character, setting and plot worksheets, your notes about beginning, middle and end scenes, are getting expanded on considerably, taking on layers of richness, complexity and depth. You keep working like this until your outline contains every single scene you’ll have in your novel. Then you go back over your outline, and you fill in the holes, you flesh out the scenes with dialogue, introspection, action, descriptions, appropriate tension in all its wondrous forms.

Most outlines are approximately a quarter of the size of the completed novel. Work out the kinks in your story in the outline stage, and you’ll secure for yourself that the writing, revision, and editing and polishing of your novel will be the easy part of the process. With a situation like this, you do all your hard work first. The clearer a writer’s vision of the story before the actual writing, the more fleshed out, cohesive, and solid the story will be once it makes it to paper. And you’ll never need to duplicate any part of the process with multiple overhauls.

While it’s perfectly acceptable to include a few brief lines of structure per scene in your outline, you can probably guess that the more information you have to start with, the easier it is to write the scene when it comes time because it’s all there—just waiting for you, the author, to turn it into something magical and exciting. The solid outline I prepare months before I write a novel allows me to produce final copy material the first time around. If you prepare an outline before beginning a challenge like NaNoWriMo (you can find help with creating your own outline with the worksheets here), you’re almost guaranteed to come out with a novel that requires only minor revision and editing and polishing instead of another draft (or two!).

Try using an outline in conjunction with NaNoWriMo. I promise you’ll see a big difference in what you’re able to accomplish.