Outlining for Pantsers by Guest Blogger Cyndi Bishop

I am delighted to present a guest blogger today, my critique partner and friend Cyndi Bishop. First I'll introduce her, then you can read her wonderful words of wisdom. Here she is:

Here's her impressive bio:

Cyndi Bishop lives in the Seattle, WA, area with her husband and dog. She writes and maintains house full time, as well as crocheting, knitting, and watching enough movies to make her a walking IMDb. She has had several articles published by Focus on the Family, but her real focus is novels, especially in the genres of sci-fi, fantasy, and adventure. 

Here are Cyndi's thoughts on Outlining for Pantsers: 

Sonja has often referred to the difference between the writers who plan, outline, and develop the entire story before even starting word one versus the writers who simply sit down and start writing with little to no plan (referred to as ‘pantsers,’ from the phrase ‘by the seat of your pants’). While she is a planner, I am a pantser.

 

I used to be a die-hard pantser. My old writing process involved simply pushing characters forward (without any real direction) until I could come up with a direction to point them. This resulted in everything going in repetitive circles before finally reaching the end. The result was clunky and even annoying to read.

 

Still, I resisted the idea of outlining. See, there’s an aspect to being a pantser (pantsing? I don’t think so) that is as addictive as brownie sundaes. When I wrote, new ideas sprang to life from nowhere – and not just at the plot level, either. A particular line of dialogue would spark a new plot point or draw out a character trait that I’d never considered before. A seemingly meaningless detail I’d thrown in for flavor in one chapter would become a hinge point for a major scene later. I delighted in watching my story take on a life of its own.

 

Outlining, on the other hand, felt restrictive. Like I was telling the story where it had to go ahead of time with no freedom for these little details to take life and bring new direction. I hated it.

 

Until I needed it.

 

I was stuck near the end of my novel, going in circles. I finally opened a new document and scribbled down ideas until I came up with a rough map for how to get to the final climax from where I was. And voila! I was no longer stuck. 

I’m still not interested in heavily-detailed outlining. I frequently don’t even know character backstories when I start. But now I outline. It’s not formal. It resembles listening to a ten-year-old kid describing his favorite movie. And new ideas still come to life and blossom organically through the process. But as soon as the spark dies down, I have a structure to return to. I’m a pantser who no longer gets trapped in circles.

 

Whether you’re a planner or a pantser, a little flexibility along the spectrum can go a long way to improve your writing. Good luck!

 

-Cyndi

Structure Part 3: The Attack

I'm sifting through the book Story Engineering, by Larry Brooks and giving you the best stuff. He offers six core competencies of a great story. I'm still working on the fourth core competency, Structure. Structure has four parts. I've already covered Parts 1 and 2. Today I'm looking at Part 3: The Attack.

By this time, the hero has been stumbling around, running away, acting scared, clueless, trying to figure out what went wrong and how he'll fix it. He was responding. Now it's time for him to fix it. This is Part 3: The Attack. He's going to get proactive and courageous and ingenious. He's going to attack the problem before him. He's going to start addressing those inner demons that hold him back. He's going to need to change, deep in his core, if he's going to have a prayer at conquering his outer problems. In Part 3, our undaunted hero will find his courage, get creative, and move forward. 

This won't happen all on its own. He's going to need new information, new awareness, and that new stuff needs to come at the right time for our hero's evolution from wanderer to warrior. This element takes place at the Midpoint (halfway through the story, between Parts 2 and 3), and from then on, the story moves forward. "The Midpoint shakes things up, the plot thickens--the antagonistic force is moving forward, too--and what the hero thought would work isn't quite enough. He needs more. More courage. More creativity. A better plan."

That's what Part 3 is for.

(This warrior is brought to you by freedigitalphotos.net)

In The Da Vinci Code, Langdon discovers there is a "teacher" who can make things clear. "The retreat of Part 2 becomes the pursuit of this teacher, coincident with his continuing avoidance of the police. Langdon realizes (at the Midpoint) that the teacher is the means of understanding and ultimate salvation. After this Midpoint realization, he's no longer running or responding, he's attacking the problem."

The final piece of the puzzle arrives at the end of Part 3, the Second Plot Point (more on this later). Then everything changes again, and we're into Part 4, The Resolution. The Second Plot Point (SPP) falls 75% of the way through the book, so if your novel is 300 pages long, the SPP should fall around page 225. That's not set in stone, just a good guideline.

My next post is The Resolution, and you won't want to miss it. What good is a book without an ending, huh?

-Sonja

Structure Part 2: The Response

I'm picking through the book Story Engineering, by Larry Brooks and giving you the good stuff. He offers six core competencies of a great story. I'm still working on the fourth core competency, Structure. Structure has four parts. In my last post, I looked at Part One, Setup. Today I'm looking at Part 2, The Response.

Part 1 ended with the First Plot Point (FPP), that moment when the real destination of the story was revealed. It clearly defined who the hero was, what he wanted, what the stakes were, and identified the antagonistic force keeping the hero from achieving his mission. Now that the first part is over, the hero has a new set of goals: "survival, finding love, getting away from love gone bad, acquiring wealth, healing, attaining justice, stopping or catching the bad guys, preventing disaster, escaping danger, saving someone, saving the entire world, or anything else from the realm of human experience and dreams." It's a tall order, but someone's gotta do it.

(This hero image is courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net)

Whatever your hero needs, there will be someone or something opposing him. If you have no opposition, you have no story.

Part 2 is the hero's response to what happened in Part 1. He's not ready to attack the problem, he's merely reacting to it, through action, decision, or indecision. He's reacting to his new goals, new stakes, new obstacles that showed up at the FPP. "In Part 2, the hero is running, hiding, analyzing, observing, recalculating, planning, recruiting, or anything else required before moving forward. If you have your hero being too heroic here, being brilliant, already knocking heads with the bad guys (or some other dark force), it's too early."

In The Da Vinci Code (which I'll admit I didn't read, but I did watch the movie to see the four parts of story structure in action), Langdon spends all of Part 2 running from the cops who are chasing him. "It's all blind response," Brooks says, "without knowing who is after him or why, and therefore without a clue as to how he can turn the tables and begin to defend or attack, and expose the truth." That's what Part 3 is for.

"At the end of Part 2, just when the hero thinks he has it all figured out, when he has a plan, everything about Langdon's journey, and the reading experience, changes. This is the Midpoint of the story." (I'll cover that in a later post.) In this part, the hero is a wanderer, blinding staggering through oppositions and risks, not sure what to do next or where to go or who to speak with. He's not an orphan any longer. He now has a purpose, a quest, and an enemy.

Part 2 takes up about 100 pages of your story. The Midpoint occurs, yep, you guessed it, in the middle of your story. So if your novel is 300 pages long, the Midpoint should fall around page 150. It's okay to give and take, as the math's a bit forgiving, but that's a good general ballpark. Have I mixed enough metaphors?

The next post will cover Part 3: The Attack.

-Sonja

Structure Part 1: Setup

I'm knee deep in a discussion of the book Story Engineering, by Larry Brooks. He offers six core competencies of a great story. I'm still working on the fourth one, Structure. In my last post, I defined structure and offered the four parts. Today I want to look at the first part, Setup.

Part one makes up the first 20% of your story and has the crucial mission of setting everything up. There are several things it needs to accomplish. First, it needs to foreshadow the antagonist (or antagonist force, if it's not a single person). You don't SHOW your antagonist in this part, you just give a glimpse of him without explaining what he's up to. 

(This antagonistic force is brought to you courtesy of freedigitalphoto.net. Feel free to use her in your novel.)

Second, it needs to establish the stakes. You've got a sympathetic hero going about his (or her) daily life. Make the reader care about this hero, and they'll care what happens next. In the setup, the reader learns "what the hero has to lose, such as a family, a fortune, or some specific purpose in life." 

"Part 1 shouldn't fully explain the conflict in terms of how it affects the protagonist until near the end of the first part." You don't want to skimp on this set-up and jump too early into the main conflict. That's not to say there won't be conflict in the beginning. That'd be boring. "The more we empathize with what the hero has at stake--what he needs and wants in his life, and what trials and tribulations and opportunities he is facing before the arrival of the primary conflict--the more we care about him when all of that changes. The more the reader cares, the more effective the story will be."

The plot really gets moving at the end of Part 1. That's when the hero figures out what he's supposed to do to combat this foreshadowed protagonist. It's where meaning becomes clear to both the hero and the reader. That moment, at the end of Part 1, is called the First Plot Point (FPP). This is not the inciting incident, which hopefully occurred sometime before the FPP. The inciting incident is when something dramatic happens to the hero and incites what happens next.

Brooks offers an example from Thelma and Louise. Two women meet a guy in a bar. In the parking lot, he becomes aggressive. They shoot and kill him. It's not an accident, it's more anger-fueled self-defense. It incites a decision. They go back into the bar and argue about what they're going to do. Call the cops and give themselves in? Make a run for it? They need to make a decision.

The FPP in this movie is when they decide to run. The inciting incident led them to make a decision that would change their lives forever. They now have a new goal in life (outrun the police), it introduces the new obstacles in their way, and it defines the stakes of their journey.

"The purpose of Part 1 is to bring the character to that transition point through a series of scenes. Part 1 ends when the hero is made aware of the arrival of something new in his life, through decision, action, or off-stage news. It launches a new quest, a sudden need, a calling, a journey, which is soften something very scary or challenging. It is at this moment that something comes forward to create an obstacle. There is now something the hero needs to accomplish or achieve."

At the end of Part 1, the reader gets his first full view of the antagonist. That doesn't necessarily mean the hero or the reader fully understands the antagonist completely, but they definitely get a notion of what he or it is about. We understand what he wants and how he stands in direct opposition to the hero. That'd be conflict. 

Brooks likens the hero in Part 1 as an orphan, unsure of what will happen to him next. The reader will feel sympathy for him. "The quest you give the hero is what adopts him going forward. It gives him purpose and meaning, a life within the context of the story. An orphan has no mission, no need other than to survive the moment. His future is unknown, left to fate."

In a full-length 300-page novel, Part 1 should take up 50-100 pages. In The Da Vinci Code (which Brooks uses as an example through the entire book), Part 1 is a tense chase scene in the Louvre. The hero has no idea what's going on, who's chasing him or why, but he's running, right up the FPP. There's no meaning, just tension. It's all setup, dramatic tension, and uncertainty. 

Questions? Comments? Emotional responses from the pantsers who don't want anything to do with this?

The next post will be on Part 2: The Response. Same bat time, same bat channel. 

-Sonja

Story Structure

Story Engineering, by Larry Brooks, offers six core competencies of a great story. The fourth competency is structure. I'm not ashamed to admit I'm a structure junkie, and this was my favorite part of the book. It can be hazardous to the writing journey to focus only one of the six core competencies, so if you're struggling with structure, you might find this method liberating.

The author begins by saying that, "in today's commercial fiction market there are expectations and proven techniques that are accepted as fundamental principles, and if you want to publish your novel you will have to honor them." Even if you're a pantser (write by the seat of your pants with no outline) or a rebel (rules are for other people, not me), you still need to understand these structural expectations to get your writing noticed. 

The core of storytelling is conflict. If you have no conflict, you have no story. If you have no sympathetic character in that conflict, you have no story. If you have no structure for that sympathetic character in conflict, you still have no story. They work together. But HOW they work together is the fun part, and it can definitely be learned.

The beauty of structure is that you never have to ask yourself what happens next? If you've established your structure before you begin writing, you have a roadmap to follow. This is similar to an outline, but not quite the same thing. I'm an outliner, and the structure Brooks presents helped me modify my existing way of outlining to be more productive. But even if you're a pantser, there's still plenty of freedom in structuring without losing the creative energy you find in writing as you go. Beautiful works of architecture follow the basic structure of "a building" and still have plenty of art and creativity and function. So please don't dismiss structure without giving it a shot, first.

(This photo, a non-formulaic work of architectural design, is brought to you by freedigitalphotos.net)

I like Brooks's analogy. Human beings all have the same structure: two arms, two legs, head, torso, etc. But no two human beings are alike. Even twins have differences. So just because you use a structure for creating your novel doesn't mean it turn out generic, or formulaic, or boring. Now, with all that out of the way, let's look at the structure as Brooks defines it.

Story structure has four parts: Setup, Response, Attack, and Resolution.

Wasn't that easy? I'll work on explaining those four parts in the coming posts, so stay tuned! You don't want to miss this fun and exciting stuff.

-Sonja

Implementing Theme

Story Engineering, by Larry Brooks, offers six core competencies of a great story. In my last post, I started discussing theme. I'd like to finish it off now and move on. Like I've said before, theme is difficult for me to understand, so I'm going to rely heavily on Mr. Brooks and his ideas for implementing theme.

Mr. Brooks says something very comforting on the first page of this chapter: "If you have complete control over the character arc... theme can sometimes take care of itself. You don't have to have an agenda to speak to the truth of life, you simply need to explore and illuminate the experiences of your characters and the consequences of their choices."

You've got to be careful to not turn your novel into a soapbox or a sermon, though. Hitting theme TOO hard will turn away readers faster than a roach sandwich. Think of theme as a continuum, a scale from 0 to 10. A zero has absolutely no theme (like the TV show Seinfeld). A 10 is outright propaganda, like something from L. Ron Hubbard (he's selling you his worldview). Exploration of theme would fall in the mid-zone, and that's exactly where you want to be. 

By exploring your character's feelings and experiences through the novel, you build theme. "If your hero learns a lesson or two over the course of your story, it stands to reason that the reader has been exposed to that very same lesson." For example, your hero abuses alcohol because he was abused as a child by alcoholic parents. In the story, he's got goals: He Must Save The Day. In order to do so, he must conquer his alcohol abuse problem. By exploring that inner demon, by showing the reader how the hero tries and fails and tries and fails and finally conquers, you've woven a theme into your novel. (Side note: having your hero wake up one day and decide to join AA would not do it. There's got to be a great motivator, a natural choice, some emotional or physical impetus, a lesson learned the hard way, that drives your hero to seek help. Don't make it too easy to conquer that inner problem, or the story will fall flat.)

In summary, "Simply having the hero explore and experience an issue, and then conquer the inner forces that would otherwise defeat him, becomes the execution of theme." 

I think we can all do that.

-Sonja

Defining Theme

 Larry Brooks's book, Story Engineering, offers six core competencies of a great story. I've covered the first two (concept and character). In my last post, I said my next post was going to be more about character. I've changed my mind. I'm skipping the rest of the stuff Mr. Brooks said about character and moving straight into the third core competency, which is theme. 

(This is a theme park. Not the same thing as theme. And my friend took this photo, so I don't have to pay a royalty for using someone else's pic of Disneyland. Isn't technology fabulous?)

For me, theme is trickiest of the core competencies. I have a hard time defining it in my own words. I have a hard time figuring it out when someone else uses their own words to define it. Mr. Brooks says theme is "what the story means. How it relates to reality and life in general. What it says about life and the infinite roster of issues, facets, challenges, and experiences it presents... theme is the relevance of your story to life...Theme is what makes you think," he continues, "what makes you feel... what will make [readers] remember it and treasure it." 

Theme is what the reader takes from the story.

I've heard many writers say that they don't worry about incorporating theme into their stories. They write what they write, and at the end, theme emerges. I'll admit I've done that very thing, mainly because I had no clue HOW to create a theme on purpose. My beta readers said they loved the theme of my book... and I have no clue it got in there, because I didn't consciously put it there. It just appeared, as if by magic.

It's not magic. I think, at some subconscious level, I must understand theme enough to make it emerge from my stories. The hard part is figuring out how that happened so I can do it again, and even more importantly, teach other writers how to do it. That's the topic of my next post, because that's what the next chapter is about. So stay tuned for "implementing theme."

Questions? Comments?

-Sonja