Writing A Novel - The Outline
I've stopped calling these "Day Whatever" because I'm already bored of keeping track of which day I'm on (even though that's as easy as looking at the title of the previous blog post).
I was still banging my head against notecarding, and I realised that this is something I’ve been trying and failing to do for years at this point and that it’s possible that this way of working just isn’t right for me. I find it frustrating to sit and force myself to come up with a lot of ideas that I know, as I’m writing them, I’m going to simply ignore, and it starts to feel like a box-ticking process rather than actual meaningful creative work. I think it’s a good technique to get the bones of a story if you go into it with literally no idea what you want to write, but after all of the work I’ve done developing mirror moments and character arcs it sort of felt like I was just wasting my time.
So instead I sat down with James Scott Beat’s 14 Supser Structure beats. I put them into a spreadsheet and just started to write ideas for scenes for each of those beats, beginning with the mirror moment. Bolting actual action onto those moments made the outline of the novel fall together really quickly.
The structure has changed from the way I initially envisioned it, too. As it currently stands I think I’ve abandoned the idea of giving the antagonist POV chapters. I still like the idea of ending each section on a POV chapter from an antagonist who we can’t identify, but I think that might be an idea for a future book. Instead I’m alternating POVs between my main character inside the dungeon, and his boss outside the dungeon. The lead has 14 chapters, and the secondary character has 8.
I’m slightly concerned that my Act 1 might be too long, but that’s basing this on the idea that every chapter is going to clock in at an equal length, and I don’t think that will be the case. In particular I think the secondary POV character’s chapters will likely be a little shorter. I want Act 1 to take up no more than 20% of the book and based purely on numbers and equal length chapters, right now it’s more like 35% of the book. So I’ll have to keep that in mind while I’m writing, and make sure I don’t let myself get too long in those early moments.
This is a good thing, though. Early chapters are the sort of place where writers do a lot of exposition that flabs up the narrative. Knowing I want to keep these first chapters short and punchy will help keep me on task.
I’m aiming for a final word count of somewhere between 90-100k words, which gives me an average chapter length of about 4-5k per chapter. I don’t know how long my chapters are actually going to be until I start writing, but I’m going to aim to keep the chapters in Act 1 closer to 2-3k words to keep the length of that section down. I think I’ll also aim for the secondary character’s POV chapters to be slightly shorter than my min POV chapters, too.
This is all theoretical, of course. I won’t know how this is all going to work until I start writing. But I know what needs to be in each chapter, I have a solid plan, and the only thing I can do now is actually start putting words on the page.
Let’s see how that goes.