Having trouble deciding whether to outline your whole novel in advance or to let the story (and characters) take you where they will? In this article, one of our novelists tells you how he arrived at a hybrid approach that gave him the perfect combination of freedom and structure.

NO “ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL” APPROACH TO PLANNING

When it comes to writing your novel, how you choose to map out the plot is a lot like how you say “potato” (i.e., po-tae-to or po-tah-to)—there really is no one-size-fits-all right answer (though I am partial to po-tae-to, myself). At one end of the spectrum, there are the writers who outline all of the major plot points of their stories before ever writing a single word of text. And at the other end of the spectrum, there are the writers who forego an outline altogether, opting to let the ideas and plot points flow naturally as they go from prologue to epilogue. If one of these options works for you, who am I to argue? Good job! But in my own writing, I have found that a hybrid approach—combining the two techniques—works best for me.

DISCOVERING A HYBRID APPROACH

With Sunshine’s Darkness (my first novel), the idea for the story came to me as part of an assignment in a writing course that I was taking. To be honest, at the time of the assignment, I really didn’t think the seeds of this story would ever mature to a finished product. Realizing that, I sat down at my keyboard and just started typing out content to fulfill the course requirement. Ideas weren’t fully considered, and even the characters weren’t fleshed out (nor do they necessarily have to be when you first start writing your novel). As I typed out the first ten chapters, I realized how much FUN it was to see ‘where the day took me.’ Since I hadn’t outlined anything, I was free to let the ideas that flowed forth take me in any direction. This was great!

That meant I never had to worry how new twists and turns would affect my end game (because at that time, let’s face it, there was no end game; just a grade). I was free to be creative—and what could be more fun than that?

Two months later, the class ended. But by then, I was so engrossed in writing my novel that I realized it was a project I just had to finish. I was nearing the halfway point. I was also starting to get knots in my stomach, and at first I didn’t know why. It seemed every time I sat down to write, I had the dreaded ‘block.’ Up until then it had been fun to just sit down and let plot twists flow forth as they came to me. Now suddenly I was tensing up every time I sat down to write. Worse, my characters were starting to stress me out because I didn’t know which direction to take them in, nor did I know the answers to two important questions that kept nagging me: “Who lives in my story?” and “Who’s going to die?”

For several days, I focused on mapping out the second half of the book, writing down explicit scenes that each of my main characters would experience, all the way to the final chapter. In many ways, my novel was finished—insofar as the plot was concerned. Now all I had to do was fill in those scenes with prose and I would be done.

What started out as free-flow writing for the first half of my novel blended into a near-rigid outline for the latter half. If someone had told me to outline this novel from the beginning, I don’t think I could have done it. After all, it was the process of discovering who my characters were and what my story was really about that solidified where I would ultimately go with the second half of Sunshine’s Darkness. That freedom to let the plot—and the characters—develop was vital to my story. Likewise, if I had continued a free-flow style of writing, it would have been impossible for me to calculate the exact moments when major plot twists needed to occur in order for certain characters to end up where they needed to be. Put another way:

By adopting the use of the outline for the second half, I was able to weave together the story that had developed freely in the first half, bringing the story to a satisfying and logical conclusion.

FINDING YOUR OWN APPROACH

If you decide to follow my method, you need not follow it to a tee. For example, you might choose to outline in the beginning a few key scenes that you want to take place, while still allowing your characters and plot to develop freely around those scenes. I didn’t do this for Sunshine’s Darkness, but with my second novel I did: I began the novel by outlining three key scenes—and the order I needed to tell about them in order to move the plot along. Likewise, you don’t need to slavishly follow your structured outline in the second half of your book if you come up with some amazing plot twist or new ending that will blow your readers away. For Sunshine’s Darkness, I thought I knew exactly what the last couple of chapters were going to be; but when I got there and it came time to write them, I found several of my characters were still left hanging. So I created a whole new ending that would weave together the characters who still had these loose threads. When something like this develops, you toss your outline aside and wrap up your book with what works best.

But whichever you choose, the one thing to keep in mind is this: It’s the end result that matters. Whichever style you ultimately choose for writing your novel, as long as it gets you to a satisfying, publishable, and FINISHED end-result, then you’ve done your job. Bravo!

So what works for you? Do you map it all out? Do you let it flow freely? Do you have a hybrid approach of your own? Leave a COMMENT to share your own techniques for developing your characters and your stories.

GREG—Read more about this editor

What Do We Mean By “Voice”?

One of the most elusive terms when discussing fiction is Voice (especially when it is capitalized). You will hear the word get thrown around in so many different directions and meaning so many different things to so many different people that it often becomes useless when trying to critique a work-in-progress in a workshop setting or within the editor/writer give-and-take. As both a teacher and editor, one of the first things that I try to do with my writers is to settle on a critical vocabulary that we can both understand and agree upon, so that when we get to the nitty-gritty of evaluating and critiquing manuscripts, there are no misunderstandings.

Voice, because of its expansive definition, is one of the most important terms to define and agree upon. Often we hear the term in its more sweeping usage—when, for instance, we speak of a young writer “finding her voice”; or of the “voice of a Dickens, or a García Márquez,” so distinctive on the page that a reader can choose a passage from among many and recognize it as the specific writer’s. On the opposite end of the spectrum, in a much narrower definition, we often hear readers speak of the voice of an individual character—one of the many particulars that differentiate him from other characters. As an editor, I use the term in its more direct relationship to the text or narration, often qualifying it as the narrative voice.

Voice is one of the craft elements that the reader experiences most directly and immediately. There is no story without the narrative voice, whether it is a very familiar first-person narrator or a distant omniscient one. Voice is the lens, the vehicle, through which the reader experiences all the other elements that make up the story. As an editor, therefore, it is important to define this term as precisely as possible, without any of the mythical baggage that comes when speaking about Voice in its capitalized and more mythical form.

Three Modes of Voice

I break the narrative voice into three distinctive categories, which guide the reader through the external world of the story, and through two levels of the internal world of characters. Contemporary fiction depends on these three modes almost exclusively. And as a writer, especially when engaged in the process of middle or late revision, it is important to know the modes the story relies on and the dramatic rationale for such reliance.

• The first mode is the descriptive voice. This is the part of the narrative responsible for relating to the reader most of the external world of the story, including the concrete world, the action, the spoken dialogue, the smells, textures, tastes and so on—essentially anything that can be perceived with the five senses. Very few stories can survive without the descriptive voice, since the world of the senses is the stage where most of our stories take place. 
• The second mode is the reflective voice. This is when the narrative begins to delve into the inner landscape of specific characters. The reflective voice is one of interpretation, processing and judgment on what the descriptive voice has laid out for the reader, whether on an action, a place or another character’s physical quality. Unlike the descriptive voice, which can often belong only to an impersonal third-person narrator, the reflective voice often occurs as a sort of duet, being at once the voice of the narrator and of the specific character whose ruminations we inhabit. Very few examples in contemporary fiction exist without a healthy dose of the reflective voice. In fact, the best of contemporary fiction seems to strike a powerful balance between these first two modes, often weaving them together in the same sentence.
• The third major mode is the direct internal voice, otherwise known in literature courses as stream-of-consciousness. It is an internal mode like the reflective voice, but it often attempts something much more radical: to directly transcribe the thoughts of an individual character as they occur. Some writers, like Proust, argue that such a task is impossible—that, since thoughts occur in the evanescent present, they are therefore not verbal or subject to the linear laws of language. Other writers, like Joyce, spend their whole lives proving that indeed the pattern of thoughts could be replicated on the page.  In contemporary fiction, however, this remains the least deployed of the three modes, but it is nevertheless a very powerful way to approach certain characterizations.

It is through establishing these clear definitions of some of the most difficult terms in the jargon of workshops and editing that I can more confidently approach each manuscript as a coach and editor.

Do you struggle with the issue of voice in your fiction writing? Or perhaps have a question for our novel expert? Or some techniques of your own that you’d like to share? Leave us a COMMENT.

MATEO—Read more about this editor