As I mentioned the other day, I finished looking over the copyedit of Rhythm & Blues.
How does a writer celebrate such a milestone? She starts working on something else, of course.
For me, this time, it’s not quite that tidy. I’ve had enough lag time between editorial phases on R&B that I’ve already completed a first draft on a new project, and begun simmering ideas for another. But now that R&B is really truly close to done forever, I feel more responsibility to see those two projects move forward in a meaningful way.
Something people ask me about a lot in Q&A sessions is how I manage to sit still long enough to produce something as heavy in word count as a novel. The answer is that I try to break down the process into as many tiny bite-size pieces as I can. In my opinion, a novel is way too large and unweildy a thing to think about all at once. Our brains are not designed for that (with the possible exception of chess masters, but they’re mostly not writing novels. They’re playing chess. So…). Trying to think about writing a whole novel is the literary equivalent of staring into the sun; the demoralizing feeling that follows, like burnt retinas. So I don’t sit down to write my novel. I sit down to work on some tiny specific thing like “find a name for protagonist” or “make this paragraph not awkward” or answer the question, “something needs to happen here, but what?” I don’t want the pressure of a whole novel on my back.
I also tend to believe, at all times, that there must be a better way to work than the way I am working. Because the way I am working yields novels, yay, but I’m always wondering, is there a way to make it yield novels more comfortably? So I’m always open to new processes and tools and things.
My favourite tool so far is Scrivener, a Mac app that works like iTunes for your manuscript, allowing you to keep it in little pieces that are easy to rearrange, reorganize and re-consider in different bite-size and overarching ways.
And the process I’m considering this time around, to re-outline my next project (I changed my mind about it… it happens) is something called “phase” outlining, where (I think I have this right…) you hammer out the bones of your story in sentence-long beats (moments, images, fragments of dialogue) which you then expand into “phases” which are like components of scenes, which you then expand into scenes and then sequences of scenes, and then chapters and then if all goes well one day you should be able to look at it and realize suddenly HEY I HAVE A NOVEL! HOW DID THAT GET HERE? COOL!
As one writer explained: “Making this outline has essentially split the draft writing process into two: figuring out what happens and figuring out how to express it.” Sounds good to me.
I’m glossing over it a bit, but I think that’s the general idea. And if that’s not quite it? Then I’ll just do it my way, because I’m the writer, and I said so, and I can do that.
If you’re interested in finding out more about phase outlining, these are the two posts I found that seem to explain it best:
- It’s Just A Phase, by Lazette Gifford (discovered via @inkyelbows on Twitter)
- Phase Outlining, by Cristin Terrill
