Since I continue to think seriously about writing a novel-in-a-month (NaNoWriMo, not to be confused with the British Columbia city of Nanaimo), I’ve been interviewing myself about the story that I would write.
I’m not doing it as formally as David Morrell (author of First Blood (Rambo) and Creepers) recommends in his writing seminars and his fine book Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing: A Novelist Looks at His Craft . I was fortunate to catch his workshop at the Stoker Weekend this summer, where he talked about how he developed a story and how he shook himself free of blocks and other writing obstructions by asking himself questions and writing the answers down in a file, an interactive, typed interview. His self-questions were often simple responses to the previous answer: So? So what? Why? This forces him to explore each answer in more detail, refusing to allow himself glib, pat, simple responses.
For this new novel, as yet untitled, I’m doing something in the same vein but without using the interactive format. I’m telling myself the story in the same way you might explain a complicated novel or movie to someone who has never seen it and probably never will. I want to get the overall form of the novel set in my mind and to explore some of the plots, themes and elements that might require research in advance. The idea is that once I start in November (assuming I do), I don’t want to have to stop too often to dream up what comes next. I’d like to have a rough outline so that each day I can write my 1700 words without playing too many games of Spider solitaire, which is my mind-freeing diversion.
So far, this rough outline is about four pages long, written in paragraph style, not in bullet form. The first page is backstory, all important to the novel but will likely never appear in the novel as direct narrative. The novel is what comes after. Parts of the back story will be revealed throughout the novel, bits at a time, from a number of different characters. In some ways it’s the McGuffin, the reason for the action of the novel. Vitally important, though, unlike Hitchcock’s device.
I’m resisting the temptation to fully outline the book. For one thing, I don’t know enough detail at this point to do so—even though I know the overall shape of the story, I don’t yet know the minutiae. That will be revealed during the writing. Besides, I only have ten days left, probably not enough time to finish Missing Persons revisions and do an outline, too. And there have to be some mysteries left for the writing process.
