TECH: Outlining Your Novel (Part Five!)

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original Posting July 15, 2016

Once more, from Outlining Your Novel by K. M. Weiland. This time, I'm looking at Chapter 5, General Sketches, Pt. 2: Key Story Factors. Chapter 4 was about making a scene list, and in this chapter, K recommends looking at five key factors: motive, desire, goal, conflict, and theme.

K starts with a discussion of three that are closely tied to characters: motive, desire, and goal. Why is this person doing these things? What are their intentions? What do they want to do? Why? Motives, or as the actors put it, what's my motivation? Motive fuels desire, desire sets goals, and then... The character acts. (Go read the book, there's a whole section that I'm shortcutting discussing these three factors).

K suggests:

1. Get a clear idea of who the character is at the start.
2. Usually, open your story with a character imperfect or incomplete, so that they can grow.
3. Give concrete examples of their behavior and what's behind it (motives, desires, beliefs) that needs to change.
4. Give the character tools to improve, such as a mentor's advice, or an unstable situation.
5. Save the revelation to coincide with the emotional and physical climax.
6. Prove their inner change through external actions.

All right? So think about the character arc, and how the character thinks about what is going on.

Next, K tackles conflict. Conflict is fundamental to a good story. So take that motivation, desires, and goals (MDG) of your character and start putting obstacles in the way. Keep it difficult for your character by:

1. Look for lags. Times that are happy and relaxed... Are good times for a problem to crop up!
2. Make a list of the 10 worst things that could happen. If that's not enough, go for 20!
3. Vary the intensity. Make your obstacle course a real pain, with water over here, hedges over there, and maybe a rock wall climb for fun.
4. Evaluate the scenes for frustration. Make sure that every scene has obstacles for your character to overcome.

Some options for obstacles? Sure! Personality clashes. Unexpected situations. High stakes, such as a tight timeline. Inner and outer battles. Look for a balance and increasing conflict. Use foreshadowing and tension to build.

Last, but not least, think about theme. You don't want to be heavy-handed, but let your theme shine through. Use your characters to show us theme. Consider some of these: what is the main character's internal conflict? How does the main character change in their views? Can you demonstrate that change? Do you want to use symbolism? What subtext, that strange implicit writing, can you use to support the symbolism and theme?

All right? So now K has opened up the outline, or the process that is building an outline, to cover thinking about what makes your characters do things, where is the conflict, and what do you think the theme is?

"Every so often, take a mental step back from the creative whirlwind you’re scribbling onto the page and evaluate these elements."

You might have been expecting a fairly linear, make up this outline and then start writing, approach. However, it seems to me that K is actually making sure that we think through our story from various directions, with scene lists, MDG of characters, conflict, theme...

Your exercise, should you chose to try it out, is to take this sketchy description of key story factors and give it a whirl! Take a story, your own or someone else's, and walk through this list. What is the main character's MDG? How about the conflict? And what's that elusive theme?

tink