Cast of Dramatis Personae Characters

(Image: stock.xchng/michaelaw)

So, here's something sorta embarrassing... I was having trouble remembering the names of some of the characters in my novel.

Yeah. I know.

They're totally minor characters, basically just red shirts. But, it's important to keep that sort of thing consistent throughout the entire piece, right?

So I did something that I really ought to have done from the start - create a list of characters and their associations. I know, I know, Writer 101 stuff. But, I've never really been one for taking copious notes or planning things out with more than just a bare outline and my brain.

In some circles, this is called "pantsing." People who do this are "pantsers." I realize how very 7th grade that sounds, but really, we're just trying to reclaim it.

But there it is. Look at me like a cautionary tale. Your novel will be full of strangers if you don't do things right. It doesn't have to be terribly in depth, just a straight up list. Is there a family, or groupings you need to keep track of? Go for it. Because most of my characters are in the military, I organized it by their squads.

Effort: Five minutes.
Not having to keep looking back through old chapters to remember character names: Priceless.

Current Soundtrack
"Black Sails" by Bear McCreary

Outlines are hard like my...

...high school algebra finals.

What?  Where did you think I was going with that?


Anyway, I've written before about my difficulty with outlines. But I decided a novel, as the single largest writing project I will have tackled so far in my life, deserved more than just to be spat out upon my keyboard, spewed forth from my brain without direction of any kind.

Thus it was that I completed an outline for my novel (which I have yet to settle on a title - that will be another blog post, I assure you).  It's a pretty basic outline which merely lists a couple of goals for each chapter, sentence fragments of ideas that I think should happen at each point.

"So and so meet at this place and discuss such and such" is essentially how it goes.

"So and so beat the crap out of each other at bla bla" and so on.

But one of the things that struck me while I was writing it was that the structure of it seemed to flow a little better.  The outline adheres to the basic idea of the novel I've had in my head, with some added junk thrown in.  But therein, you'll recall, was my problem - I constantly have new ideas I want to add in which ends up changing the project drastically as I'm writing it.  With the outline, I'm hoping to avoid it, but I don't know if that's possible because I simply found myself modifying the outline on the fly!

My high school art teacher, who always was reminding me that I was very talented but extremely lacking in organization and follow through, once said that "the real world doesn't have outlines."  This was because my naturally cartoonish artistic style meant that every object I drew had lines to define its shape instead of using shade.  It's sort of hard to describe, but essentially it boils down to, Look at the world around you and note that no real object has a black line around it.

This is a completely different kind of outline, but the idea popped into my head earlier as I was finishing the outline.  I thought this was very funny because now years later, outlines are still bugging me and I'm still a giant pain in the ass who lacks organization and follow through.

The dreaded outline

I am not what you would call a particularly organized person.  I tend to just sort of let things happen, let them pile up.  I don't really plan things all that well, and I'm sometimes very poor at budgeting my time.

Of course, this is a problem for a person who wants to tell stories.  Disorganized stories can be a huge turnoff for a reader.  But my writing style is very "get started and see what happens."  The number of times I've started a project only to decide halfway through to veer off in another direction because I had what I thought was a better idea is astonishing.  It also means that there is a graveyard of unfinished stories, screenplays and half-baked ideas littered like slaughtered corpses throughout my hard drive.

For writing short stories, this is actually rather an easy problem to overcome.  They're typically short enough that I can just write and see where it goes and generally be pleased with the outcome.  I had some struggle with "The Box," but overall the writing of it went smoothly.  Of the stories in "Show Me the End of the World" only "DreamTime" and "Man's Best FrienD" went through any serious revisions.

But writing a novel is an entirely different animal.  I've even written screenplays without any real outline... they just sort of come out of me the way they do, and I rarely feel the need to go back and change them.  I've been slowly revising one that's been gestating since college, but even that has remained largely the same in terms of its structure.  Each time I read it, I see where I could make a funnier joke or that I need to add an earlier reference to pay off something that happens later, but for the most part the skeleton of the thing hasn't changed in the years since I originally sat down to write it while working crappy desk shifts in good ol' Larned Hall.

For this novel, I attempted to come up with an outline.  The problem is that when I sat down and started writing the novel I almost immediately started deviating from the outline!  I've struggled with this problem for all the time I've been a writer; rigid boundaries simply don't agree with me.  Outlines for school papers were a pain in the ass, and when teachers forced me to do second and third drafts as part of the assignment, I often simply passed in the first draft again and they'd get upset.  Even at work, I hate being constantly boxed in by design concepts older than I am, and I'm constantly battling with people over this.

I guess what I'm going to try for the novel outline is to simply write a simpler one.  I was trying to sketch it all out down to the individual scenes, but that isn't working for me.  I think I'll just put one or two sentences down for the goal of each chapter and hope that I can stick to that.

But maybe I'll get halfway through and decide, no, that's not how I roll.

Current Soundtrack
"Total Recall" by Jerry Goldsmith

Getting started is hard on the knees

So now that I've put out this collection of stories (again, with other formats coming soon) I've also begun work on a novel.  It's not my first novel, which may come as a surprise to some people.  No, when I was a wee teenager, I got it in my head that I should write, of all things, a 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' novel.

How prophetic.

Kinda.

It was a pretty terrible novel, I can admit that.  Actually, let me take that back; I was really proud of the story that I had come up with, but I'm sure that if I read it now, it would just reek of amateur hour nonsense.  The basic plot had to do with (sigh) vampires invading the Federation.  Of course, only the crew of the Starship Enterprise could stop it!  Anyway there was a whole thing where there was actually this vampire cloud in an episode of the original 'Star Trek' series, and I postulated that this cloud was, in fact, the origin of vampire myths around the galaxy and there was lots of cool stuff going on with fighting vampires and fighting... vampire clouds... Whatever, it was cool.  Trust me.

So now, now I'm working on a real novel.  Y'know, one that I can publish for real.  Not just 120,000 words of fan fiction.

But it turns out that writing a novel is like really hard, man.  Part of my problem is that my writing style is typically very stream-of-consciousness.  I tend to just sit down, start writing, and see where it goes from there.  I also have developed what seems to be an aversion to second drafts.  I don't like going back and revising things.  This caused lots of problems in school when I was forced to produce a second draft of a paper, when I felt very comfortable with the first draft and felt no need to change it.

Writing a novel, on the other hand, is a different beast than a five page paper, or a 7,000 word short story.  I'm forced to create what they tell me is called an "outline" and even that isn't very structured.  My impatience has led me to write approximately 6,000 words of this novel before the outline is even finished.  I don't like planning; I'm not a planner.  I like to just write.  But if doing all this extra work helps me put out a more cohesive novel, then so be it.

By the way, I've already written the last line of the novel.  I'm not going to tell you what it is, even though lots of people like to read the last page of the book first.  (Weirdos)

Current Soundtrack:
"Fast & Furious" by Brian Tyler