Outline Drafts
This afternoon I wrapped up the third draft of my outline. I guess the "third" word in the previous sentence eludes to part of my insanity. I like to control my story from beginning to ending, and the only way to do that is to spend a significant amount of time thinking it through.
Many writers detest this. They believe sitting down at the computer and acting like a conduit to the story rather than the crafter is how a story should be written. These same people often believe Writers Block is a genuine problem for a writer.
I respect that. It takes a massive amount of courage to sit down and not know where the story is going to take you. But it also means there is a lot of editing, a lot of work thrown away, and a lot of grief. Some stories get 3/4 written only to self-destruct toward weak endings that often have deux ex machina stamped all over them. I am far too anal to work that way—too frightened of wasting my time.
So I dream. I dream for a long time. The story percolates and becomes real before I even put a word down. It comes to me like a movie plays out, and by the time I am ready to write I have done the creative, fun work already and I am merely the storyteller of what has become a very real story despite not being placed on a concrete page.
It begins with that dream time, but the outline of the story requires time and tweaking. In the first two books, when I've written my outline, I haven't been wholly done with my dreaming. It bleeds through between the black ink upon the white page. Therefore, I need sometimes multiple drafts of the outline to be finished before I can start writing.
And that's where The Winter Scion is at now. The third draft of the outline is complete. I like it. I think it works. It is one chapter smaller than the first book, has two more point of view characters, and it has action from start to finish. It builds nicely off the foundation of Song of the Fell Hammer and pushes the overall storyarc forward. The Winter Scion is a self-contained story, but has tendrils into the third book.
Now only if a publisher finds the same merit in it my dozen early readers have.
Many writers detest this. They believe sitting down at the computer and acting like a conduit to the story rather than the crafter is how a story should be written. These same people often believe Writers Block is a genuine problem for a writer.
I respect that. It takes a massive amount of courage to sit down and not know where the story is going to take you. But it also means there is a lot of editing, a lot of work thrown away, and a lot of grief. Some stories get 3/4 written only to self-destruct toward weak endings that often have deux ex machina stamped all over them. I am far too anal to work that way—too frightened of wasting my time.
So I dream. I dream for a long time. The story percolates and becomes real before I even put a word down. It comes to me like a movie plays out, and by the time I am ready to write I have done the creative, fun work already and I am merely the storyteller of what has become a very real story despite not being placed on a concrete page.
It begins with that dream time, but the outline of the story requires time and tweaking. In the first two books, when I've written my outline, I haven't been wholly done with my dreaming. It bleeds through between the black ink upon the white page. Therefore, I need sometimes multiple drafts of the outline to be finished before I can start writing.
And that's where The Winter Scion is at now. The third draft of the outline is complete. I like it. I think it works. It is one chapter smaller than the first book, has two more point of view characters, and it has action from start to finish. It builds nicely off the foundation of Song of the Fell Hammer and pushes the overall storyarc forward. The Winter Scion is a self-contained story, but has tendrils into the third book.
Now only if a publisher finds the same merit in it my dozen early readers have.
posted by Shawn C. Speakman | 9:10 PM
4 Comments:
Sean Burk:
I thoroughly enjoyed the prologue, chapter one, and chapter 9 I believe it was what was posted as a stand alone along time ago. In all honesty a lot of what you're doing reminds me stylistically of what Terry Brooks did in his earlier books, which I found to be of higher quality than recently. (Actually you and I had an in depth conversation on this my one and only time to visit the webchat there). To be even-handed I think some of the names border on a little much--a la Greg Keyes, but that is of personal preference and something that I am probably in the minority on.
One of the main things I like about your style is that it is founded in a voice that borrows from others, yet uniquely comes together in its own definition. From the excerpts I have read, I come away feeling that--"I just read a Shawn Speaksman chapter," even though I haven't read enough to actually know your style.
As for posting more chapters, I'm all for it :>) but of course I would be; Secondarily for the pleasure of reading--though this is tempered by the fact that one wouldn't be reading the whole book, rather just another morsel, and Primarily for the opportunity to further analyze your usage of words, sentences, flow, structure, etc.....finding what I like, what speaks to me, and implementing them in my own positive way.
In our brief conversation on Terry Brooks' forum you took the time to read the first paragraph of my book and made a few passing suggestions that were minor but pervasive--namely, brought to my attention the homogeneous nature of my sentence structure, and an unintended repetition of words. In turn I have worked hard in editing my book to implement a more varying pace, while keeping the trudging pace where it allowed to bring the reader into that moment, in a sense experiencing the hardship of the charactar.
I find your thoughts on my "voice" the most interesting out of what you posted. Sure, I like people to like my excerpts, but I have not thought that much about my own voice.
I know there is a large echo of Terry Brooks in my writing. I could probably force myself to change that—after all, I am the writer and have that power—but I don't think my voice would be genuine then. I grew up reading Terry, he was and still is a huge influence on my life, and changing it would be like trying to change my DNA—it wouldn't work. I am curious who else you "hear" in my language?
I am pleased you compare me to Terry's earlier books, and I wish I could see it. I think my style is similar in tone to The Heritage of Shannara series. But I won't argue with you—what you said is high praise and I thank you for it.
The summer is beginning to end. It is in the air. I wonder if I'll know something more definitive about my book by Fall...? Hmm.
Sean Burk
I have heard you, as well as other authors, mention "fleshing" out thier charactars through dialogue when editing. It is my assumption from this then, and reinforced by my own experience in writing, that it is more difficult to let dialogue rather than narrative direct points in the book on the initial writing.
Why do you think that is? And MORE IMPORTANTLY how do you tackle this "fleshing out" process? Obviously you can edit and find any of a million scenes to throw in dialogue that makes plot points rather than narrating, but that seems to be arbitrary change, as opposed to a systematic remedy to the problem.
Those are good questions, Sean, and there aren't really any easy answers to them. So I will try and it will have to be my best.
I'd like to address one thing before I do so, though. It is important to understand what dialogue does and why it is important.
First, it a way of having characters interact with one another. A reader can glean a lot from these moments that they couldn't otherwise have had with narrative. It's all about character development.
Second, it reads faster. Dialogue moves a story a long faster than narrative, giving the reader a satisfactory sense they are accomplishing something with their time. To see an example of how this is used to great advantage, look at The DaVinci Code.
I'm sure dialogue facilitates even more than this, but this is why I believe dialogue is important—at least for my work.
All of that said, why is it harder to write dialogue than write narrative? After all, we speak in dialogue all day long. Shouldn't it come easier than the large splashes of narrative we write?
Well, it should, to be honest.
But there is one entanglement—ourselves.
When we write, we write from a singular perspective. We are silent as we write (some writers aren't and I bet you can tell which ones jabber to themselves like lunatics), and the lone writing leaves us only with our thoughts. As we type, we are in directly within our point of view characters mind, and without a companion to bounce dialogue off of we have our character thinking silently.
This leaves us with a lot of narrative and no dialogue.
Plus, if we have done our dream time correctly, we have intimate knowledge of our characters. It is easy to get into their heads and write narrative. But dialogue takes a lot of advance scene thought and that kind of work makes writers lazy.
I found on my first draft that I put the barest of bones down for my dialogue. When I came back through on the edit, I saw many opportunities for character growth that I had previously ignored in favor of finishing the book.
Some writers have a different take on this. Terry Brooks, for instance, writes his dialogue and when he comes through on his edit he subtracts as much as he can from his writing without losing its meaning. He works hard at making every word count. I think there is a lesson to be learned there as well.
Anyway, there are my musings. Do with them what you will.
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