Pay As You Go

Maybe you shouldn’t outline after all?

Justine Larbalestier in her blog at http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/?p=398 has some good advice on writing novels for would-be novelists.

Among her notes is that writers who are not veterans ought not outline. ‘Make it up as you go along,’ she advises, until you have written a few novels, and can then rely upon your experience to decide whether an outline is a process that would help you or hinder you.

And I must say this sounds sensible.

Only to add these notes:

1. Pay as you go, or make it up as you go, will often lead to dead ends, as even the veteran pulp author Leigh Brackett found in her career. Therefore I would advise everyone who pays as they go, to pay it out till the bitter end, even if it is crap, even if it won’t work, even if it hurts.
   (Brackett was not in your position; she knew the racket, and she needed to be paid for each page she pulled out of her typewriter. If she knew the story was unpublishable, as she would know, being a pro, she also knew that it would only be a waste of her time and paper to go on with it. You can’t know that until you’ve sold a hundred or so short stories and a couple dozen novels.)
2. If you do hit a blank wall, then the best approach I have found is to bash your head against it until it breaks (your head or the wall). Nine times out of ten it’s the wall that will break. But sometimes it’s your head. In that instance, glue your skull back into place and outline what you have done so far.
   (This outline will give you a bit of perspective on what you have done and will, maybe, show you the weak chink in the wall that your busted head just might crack through.)

As for No. 2 above, Ms Larbalestier seems to concur, as she advises outlining the complete first draft in a spreadsheet (something the ‘Snowflake Method for Writing a Novel’ advises before writing the first draft). She does not address the issue of the Gordian Knot problem, of the wall that broke your skull.

But the all-time Golden Rule for talesmen (and all artists for that matter) is:

Whatever works for you is the thing you ought to do, until it stops working. Then try something else.

Words to live and tell tales by.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, June 30, 2008)