Writing Meme: Playing With Worlds [1/30]

I must confess to being a shameless copycat.  Instead of writing a brilliant and original post for you entertainment, I have stolen a writing meme from Onna.  I am going to borrow her method of doing it, too: instead of filling out all the questions at once, I will make each question into a blog post.  I have also created a handy directory of all the questions for those who wish to steal the meme. 

1. Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you've worked with and why.

I am so tempted to say ‘the one I haven’t worked with yet’, but that would be unfair. I’d be a fool to let discontentment color my view of the past.

Each novel that I’ve worked on has had its own charm and its own give-and-take. With each one, I would be justified in saying, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Tears for the Silent Lands, which in my memory always feels bland and hopelessly riddled with errors, is the only novel I’ve finished. POE, my first attempt, had all the magic of a first love along with all the clichés. Enchantress, the novel that completely swept me away, I ended up abandoning because the premise went against my conscience and my faith. And now, two-thirds of the way through Evanescent Moonlight, one of my more stable works, all I can see is the lack of characterization and description, the inconsistencies, the chapters that need to be taken out, and the overall un-stellar-ness.

So really, I could almost say that my favorite universes are the ones I’ve stolen from other writers – namely, fanfiction. The time I spent writing for the Sherlock Holmes universe was an absolute blast. I loved being able to dive into a complete and fascinating character, along with the moody, nostalgic world he lived in. The experience taught me so much about what a true character is, and why we love some books and forget about others. Compared with such brilliant craftsmanship, all of my ‘children’ only seem more and more like cardboard cutouts.

Phase Outlines

Yesterday as I flipped through my expanding folder of writing papers, I came across a collection of papers that went with my NaNoWriMo 2008 novel, Tears for the Silent Lands. In it, I found something I’d nearly forgotten about – the phase outline. A phase outline is an outline that details every scene (or part of a scene) in a novel. It can be as short or as long as the author wants, but the longer it is, the more effective it is. It’s designed specifically to include the little details that the author sees in a scene ahead of time, but would be out of place in any other kind of outline. Here is an example of part of a phase outline:

34. Katharine turns the corner and finds a flight of stairs leading up to a door at the top. She is angry, and is determined to no longer feel fear. She climbs the stairs. Boards creaking like moaning ghosts.

35. She opens the door. As soon as she does, a bullet whizzes past her head. She screams, runs back down the stairs, and does not stop until she is out of the building.

36. Katharine sits at the base of one of the building’s brick walls, knees to her chest, and tries to figure out what to do. Wishes she hadn’t lost her cell phone. Wonders who she would call even if she did have it.

This type of outline is particularly useful during NaNoWriMo, because you can look to the outline to see what you’re going to write next, and then just elaborate on what’s already there. It helps you get through the slow days when you have no inspiration whatsoever. And if you think of something better than what’s on the outline, great!

As it turns out, this is exactly what I needed for outlining Part III of Evanescent Moonlight. I know what things the third part needs to accomplish, but I wasn’t sure of the sequence of events and I was afraid to try to plan. Now with the phase outline, I can give the ending a test-run, telling the story in condensed form to see if it works. For example, I’m only a page into the phase outline, but I’ve already discovered that I need to include a battle I was not anticipating. Going through the story beforehand gives me a chance to work out all the little problems that arise when you have as many characters as I do.

The one downside to the phase outline is that it takes time. My outline for Tears for the Silent Lands ended up being about 10,000 words long. But it was worth it, because what I spent in planning beforehand, I didn’t spend in headaches during November.