Outline or wing it?
July 28, 2009
Both.
There. Done. My shortest blog post ever.
More details? It won’t be pretty.
Don’t tell my editor, but I write the first 50 pages blind. I have no idea who the characters are or what they will do. Because I write historical fiction, I know when and where they’ll be, and have researched the era and place for hours and hours and hours and…you get the picture. I have some ideas of cool or truly awful historical events and facts I want to look at, but that’s all.
After I finish those 50 pages I read them to see if they might actually be part of a novel. If not, I pitch them and write another 50 pages. If so, I start to outline. I outline the whole book, beginning to end.
Then I write another 50 pages. At the end of those I discover that my outline is wrong. The outline is wrong both going forward (i.e., things I haven’t written yet) and going backward (i.e., things I have written that weren’t in the original outline). More outlining. I write another 50 pages and…you get the idea.
Looking at it put down here, it seems totally crazy, but it is my process. After having sat through many classes on “the writing process” I’ve discovered only one truth: Your process is your own. Figure out what your process is and honor it. If you think outlining sucks all the fun out of writing, don’t make yourself do it. If the thought of embarking on a year long journey of novel writing without any damn idea of what you’re doing gives you hives, by all means write an outline. Neither approach is wrong, despite what you may hear.
When I’m all done I match up the outline to the actual book I wrote so I can keep track of what happens in the book. Rewriting starts. I rewrite tons as I’m one of those weird writers who writes too little and always has to add new scenes (as opposed to the writers who write too much and have to delete scenes).
There it is: the good, the bad, and the ugly. My process.
What’s yours?
Criminal past
July 15, 2009
Not having an actual criminal past that I am willing to admit to on the Internet, I decided to talk about the crimes that started me down the road to publication.
When I was on Spring Break near Munich, I skipped out on Oktoberfest and went to Dachau. Wind moaned through the open wooden barracks. I shivered in my 1980s fashionable black leather ankle boots, transfixed by pictures of some of the greatest crimes against humanity ever perpetrated. One wall held a row of colored triangles: yellow, red, green, blue, purple, pink, brown and black. Above, thick black letters spelled out the categories: Jewish, political prisoner, habitual criminals, emigrant, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, gypsies and asocials (a catchall for murderers, thieves, and those who violated the laws prohibiting Aryans from having intercourse with Jews).
Even though I was just a teenager, I’d read enough to know what the Nazis did to the Jews, the Communists, and the gypsies. But I’d had no idea they’d imprisoned people for being gay.
I stuffed my hands deep into the pockets of my too light coat (with rolled up sleeves and the collar up in the back, because it was 1985) and thought about my host brother. He was the same age as me and we often went clubbing in Berlin until the wee small hours of the morning. The subways stopped running around midnight, and if you missed that last one, you were out until five. My brother had perfectly style 80s blonde hair, an extravagant fashion sense, and he was gay into the marrow of his bones. Forty years before he would have gone to the camps for it.
All the way back home I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It’s been twenty five years and I’m still thinking about it. I wrote my senior history thesis on it, where I discovered that when the Americans freed the camps we sent the pink triangles straight to prison. Because it was still against the law.
Hard to find a bigger crime than the Holocaust, and that’s where my road to publication led me.
* * *
Fun fact for the week: My next book opens with a zeppelin-jacking, so I got to do a lot of research on zeppelins. I’m willing to bet that in terms of miles traveled, zeppelins were far safer than the airplanes of the day. Anyone know where I could track down that statistic?