Writing a Novel - Outlining a Scene

I’ve said before that I don’t like to outline my books. I tried breaking this habit (just to try something new) in Critical Times, and the result was that after just a few scenes I’d strayed so far from the original outline that I almost never referred to the outline again. So yeah, that was a couple of wasted days. I guess, in the end, it's just not the way my brain works when I set my ideas to paper. Some writers like planning it all out, I don’t. No big deal.

However, one technique that I’ve started implementing with my last couple books is scene outlining. It’s pretty straightforward. The way it works is this: before I start narrating the scene or crafting the dialogue, I go through and create a kind of shorthand description of everything that happens. It’s the mental equivalent of fast-forwarding a movie/TV show (ah, the old days of VHS) and catching the gist without having time to notice details. Here’s an example of a scene outline for the first scene in FLEE:

Peter Burton’s living room. It’s late. Wife’s in bed (name?) Elders sit around table. Nervous faces, silence. Soft enough to hear a clock ticking? The conversation here is strained, cryptic. Letter from branch is discussed. Audience doesn’t know the contents. Tension builds. Nothing about evacuation mentioned. We need to see Peter here as being experienced elder but lacking confidence, deferring to others. (This gives him room to grow) (Needs mentor here, maybe older elder??) BOE is small (4? 5? Why so small? Where is this cong located?) Must be tense, but must also feel love of elders to flock. A look behind the scenes feel. Documentary-esque. Endear reader to these men.

If you’ve ever studied theater or film making, you’ll probably notice that the above outline looks a lot like a screenplay (with the exception of dialogue, which is absent in my description). It’s like a 2D sketch on the surface of a rough slab of marble. The idea is there, and that's a large portion of the cerebral work, but now it’s a matter of chipping and chiseling away everything that isn’t the scene until the result is something that resembles art. (If you want to read the final version of the scene, click here. You can decide for yourself how successful I was!)

I like writing these scene outlines before I jump into writing, because it gives me the general atmosphere and the goal of the scene, and I’ve found that this is often half of the battle. The other great thing about this for me is that if I have to stop writing in the middle of a scene (which happens nearly every time I sit down to write), I can come back to it later and not spend fifteen minutes twiddling my thumbs or wasting time on YouTube videos trying to figure out where my head was when I left my desk. Also, as you can see from the above example, this quick brainstorm helps to reveal gaps in the story (in this instance, Who are the other elders? Why is their congregation so small? Who is Peter’s wife?). I can then either address the issues immediately or set them aside to discuss later (for this reason, I also keep an “unanswered questions” document on hand and refer to it constantly as I move through the story).

Of course, just like the story outlines that I can never seem to stick to, I often change a bunch of things as I go from scene outline to first draft. Still, it’s a great launching pad, and it’s become one of my go-to writing tools, so I thought I’d share.

In other news, Book 2 of the FLEE series (working title: STAY) is coming along surprisingly well! I’m nearly a third through the first draft, and it’s only been a month since I started. Of course, this could mean that I’m due for a three-month-long writer’s block, but I’m trying to keep my hopes up, my head down, and my fingers to the keyboard. We’ll see.