Make Outlining Your Book Fun!
"I hope she knows you only like the beginnings of things" - Dr. Faye Miller, 'Mad Men' S4E13, by Matthew Weiner, Jonathan Igla, Brett Johnson, Erin Levy
Currently, I’m between projects. I’m submitting stories and poems from more or less completed manuscripts, eventually I’ll be submitting the manuscripts. The increasingly-less-secret project Brendan and I have been working on (like this one, but also not like this one! Stay tuned!) is in a marinading period. That means I’ve had some time to work on new ideas—here defined as ideas I’ve had within the last year or so, but haven’t done any writing on. Finishing—or at least coming to a stopping place—a project means I get to work on a new thing, and it’s got my brain turning with possibility.
“But Chris,” you say. “You don’t have any books published.”
First of all, rude. Second of all, yeah, we’ll get to publication. But what kind of writer waits until publication to start something new? I’ve had two ideas for novels in the ol’ percolator, right there with the fish, for about six months. The last week or so, I got to outlining. And outlining fun! So full possibilities! It’s like Spring Training for your book, every chapter is in first place.
A Note On My Chaos Energy
I allude to this a lot, but I spent most of my time in college writing, and the entirety of my first decade out of college alternating between “discouraged” “crestfallen” and “burned out like an incandescent bulb during the Biden administration.” However, by the end of college, I’d written enough stories and poems that I was working on a few manuscripts. The ideas are too stubborn to totally leave my head, so I’ve been kinda backed up trying to get this stuff at least first drafted so I can begin to think about other stuff.
By now, I’m used to juggling different projects. The two novels I started outlining this week? My goal is a first draft, NaNoWriMo-style, by early next year. But feeling like they’re good enough to even consider close to finished? Shit man, who knows. Hopefully not too long.
Soundtracking
This is something I decided to do sometime around last summer or full because 1) seemed fun and 2) certain sounds just fit certain moods, man. It is atypical of me to listen to Between The Buried And Me on a summer’s day, and almost unheard of to listen to Anderson .Paak when there’s snow on the ground. Same goes for listening to music while I write.
I like instrumental music, just in general but also while writing. Oddly, I’m more willing to listen to hip-hop or metal while writing poetry—idk if those two genres maybe show me the extremes of what you can do with both words and feelings? Fiction, of course, is math rock or whatever you wanna call Chon/Polyphia/Covet/DJ PERRO/Elephant Gym/Foster Parents and jazz. Instrumental music that sets the tone but doesn’t jumble my brain with words.
Most importantly, though, is the tone-setting. I’m sort of operating on Beerfest logic here, suggesting that hearing Syncatto’s A Place To Breathe tricks reminds you to write a vampire story or whatever. But it does trick your brain a bit. Try it out.
Back-Of-The-Book Summary
Hey! Before we start this section, YouTube showed me a cool band, while I was writing! I’m not even finished watching this set yet, join me. You ever feel like a band was designed by God for you to enjoy? This band has the word “seafoam” in their name.
Inspired by Charles Finch’s “I write a brief, extremely dull short story” advice for outlining mysteries, I’ve started writing a cheesy back-of-the-book summary for my stuff. This, like an outline, helps remind me the general “what’s happening” in the book, but in a more focused, compressed way.
It’s also a hype tool! I used the word “cheesy” on purpose. These are like B-movie posters or hand-holding 1980s movie trailers or Star Wars opening crawls. I read every opening crawl every time I watch Star Wars, which is often, it gets me hyped for my 800th viewing of Empire Strikes Back. Reading my own “back of the book” gets me hyped up to write.
Style and Influences
I like to catalog who or what I am reading (or sometimes watching, film and TV are inspirations too!) that gets me in the zone for the book. Maybe I am borrowing stylistic devices from an author, maybe I am trying to emulate the mood of a particular director, maybe I am trying to be cognizant of the traditions in which I am writing. I definitely know that, a year from now or less, I’ll probably want to re-read one or more of these books, especially as the editing process starts.
Setting
This one and the next is where I start getting into a lot of note taking. I like to read a lot about my settings. I like to spend time in similar weather as my settings. I like to watch movies set in my settings. That whole time, I’m writing down specific details—food, the mood the skyline strikes, how everything sounds, the names of plants and animals—and saving for use in my writing. Or I’ll just write a few imagistic descriptions, try out chapter introductions.
Even if your setting is entirely made up, it needs to feel lived in. Take some time and live there, even if it’s “living” there.
Characters
Two books come to mind when I think of “had to keep a character list handy”: Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Do these books have any less complicated a cast of characters as, idk, Fight Club? What about this: do people get any less complicated—like, on an individual level—just because there are other people around? I enjoy 100 Years and As I Lay Dying both a great deal, and the character sheet helps out. Maybe a character sheet would improve my experience with The Road, too, though.
You should be able to write whole Wikipedia pages for your characters. You should know a lot of things that your characters told you in confidence. Your characters are like family members: whether good, bad, genius, rock-stupid, religious, aetheist—you love them. Once you stop loving your characters, they are not your characters any more. Don’t be Martin Amis.
Table of Contents
Here is why I outline the way I do, with a goddamn Table of Contents: because I need to know what happens in my books. I’m on record as semi-believing novels and poems already exist out there in the aether, it’s the author’s job to find them. Part of that is writing the third draft of my novel last summer, I realized it was a novel in verse. Then, after I wrote that draft, I realized that three of my five narrators weren’t narrators. Before all that, I would shift through years of notebook scribbles—and sure, chalk this up to bad organizing—and I wouldn’t know what scene went where, what it meant for which character, anything that was going on.
Again, this is probably more of a 24-year-old Chris problem than anything, but still.
But really: I had to learn to write all different ways. Notebooks, Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and maybe most crucially: on my phone. Until my kid started school—three solid years of my life—there was no sitting down at a writing desk. I finally had to get an app or at least something that could be shared with my computer easily. Then I had to get comfortable writing weird places: with my kid strapped to my chest sleeping as a baby, with my kid at the playground and me off to the side on some bench. The app I use lets you scroll by chapter title, and it is sooooo helpful for writing on the fly. You can easily find a spot where stuff is happening and jump in. Or you can write a little one-sentence summary of that chapter narrative and know to expand it later. Then, writing the first draft is almost like figuring out a puzzle. That’s pretty cool, right? Writing books is cool.
Finale
Look, I don’t know how to end books and I barely know how to end blog posts. This section’s called “Finale,” but that’s because that’s the title of the Polyphia song up there. How do you end a “here’s how much fun I find outlining, no I haven’t been published yet post?” Look man, I’m not here to tell anyone how to do anything.
The main goal of this blog is to remind myself and you that writing is fun. Use music to trick your brain. Have an excuse to re-read your favorite book. Play little games with yourself. Death to “I spent eight hours today staring a paragraph and deleted everything but two words.” Long live “I read a poem, jammed out some tunes, and wrote 2,000 words.”
Like my coach told us when the AAU team full of somehow-6’6”-eighth-graders took the court, have fun out there.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris