By Kathy Flann
Baltimore, MD, USA
Some writers swear by the outline as the best tool for
creating a narrative arc. A novel’s structure – or lack thereof – correlates to
its tension and suspense. Publishers, of course, want readers to turn pages. Does
a novel become more “publishable” if we plan out the plot?
This oft-debated topic connects to the Hamlet soliloquy more than one might think. In short, does an
outline determine whether the book be
or not be?
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| Kathy Flann |
No matter what, it seems important to make an active choice. The
decision not to design the plot is still a decision, the same way that if
Hamlet elected not to whack his uncle, it would reflect the choice to leave his
father unavenged.
As a short story writer, I suffer from no such hand-wringing
conundrum. I can skip along with my little basket, humming and picking flowers,
in order to discover rather than design my story’s tensions. The short
story is typically fewer than 30 pages and contains a single conflict that
occurs over a short period of time – a few hours up to a few days in a
character’s life. I can create a character, put her in motion, and see what she
does or does not do. This is manageable in a story that covers so little of a
character’s life.
For example, in the title story of my collection, Get a Grip, the main character’s dad
leaves a novelty inflatable boyfriend on the porch of her garage apartment.
It’s intended as a cute joke for her fortieth birthday. When she opens the door
and sees it, the thing has a leak, and it atrophies and dies in front of her.
This spectacle triggers an existential tailspin, a panic about why she’s still
living in the garage apartment behind her dad’s house and still working at his
statuary business, Big Pat’s Granite Ranch. She ends up having sex with her
ex-boyfriend when he drops by with a birthday gift. The rest of the story
explores the consequences of this decision over a couple of days.
I wrote the opening scene quickly, as well as the ending, but
it took a few years of stumbling and fumbling and putting the story away for a
while to realize there was a scene missing in the middle. It turned out I had hummed
and skipped along into the proverbial swamp and now I was covered in chiggers
and quicksand. The discovery method
ain’t easy. But when we’re dealing with nuanced, short work that covers such
short periods of time in a character’s life, a storyboard or index cards may
not be the tools for figuring out structure. For me anyway, a short story
relies on deep knowledge of character more than observable action, though we
still need both. In the end, I composed a scene of a few minutes in which the
character and her ex search for something they’ve lost under the bleachers at a
minor league baseball game. We bear witness to a tiny epiphany that leads to
the ending.
By comparison, the novelist works on a vast canvas, producing
stories of 250 manuscript pages at the short end and, at the long end, upwards
of 1000. There may be multiple conflicts or multiple points of view (meaning
multiple main characters). We might cover years in a character’s life rather
than hours. In order to keep readers engaged for such a long haul, we probably
need more observable action than is necessary in a short story. It is a lot for
the writer to track and understand.
When I teach college fiction workshops or speak at writing conferences,
I mentor both short story writers and novelists. When I first started teaching
novelists, I hadn’t understood all the ways that the length discrepancy between
the two forms shaped the ways they must be crafted. They both had the same
basic form – inciting incident, rising action, climax, resolution. In fact,
novels often had similar types of conflicts as short stories – domestic strife,
fraught workplaces, chance meetings.
Over time, though, I saw the same problem again and again. In
a word, it was pacing. The aspiring
novelists tended to cover way too much plot or way too little in the opening
chapters. These chapters sometimes covered the plot of the whole book, leaving
one to wonder what else there was to say. At the other end of the spectrum, the
opening chapters might feature characters doing daily tasks, like commuting to
work, with no conflict in sight.
I started to require the novelists to submit synopses of
their whole books in order to help me gauge the percentage of the plot that had
unfurled in the first chapter or two. The unforeseen benefit was that the
writers also began to understand their overall plots. Before I’d even given
them feedback, they’d say, “Yeah, I think I’m getting to the climax too early.
I wanted that to be somewhere around page 180, not page 35.”
Aha, I thought. I’d heard about novelists using outlines,
though I had no firsthand experience. I’d always ascribed to the E. L. Doctorow
school of thought: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only
see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Now I was starting to believe that the
process depended – or should depend – on the type of novel one was writing. The more observable action in a
novel, the more an outline might help the writer find her way. The writers I
mentored tended to have more in common with Robert Patterson than with E. L.
Doctorow.
Robert Patterson has said of his process, “I write an outline
for a book. The outlines are very specific about what each scene is supposed to
accomplish.” One can imagine that composing these outlines is as much work as
writing the books themselves. An outline would force the writer to see the
swampy morass from above, a bird’s eye view, bringing into focus the route the
story might travel, the places where events crowded together or stretched far
apart.
Then again, maybe the issue wasn’t even the type of novel one
was writing so much as the type of brain one had. For a lot of writers (aka
introverts), it’s easy to make characters too thinky and to forget about
characters’ external worlds. Yet writers can be a little snobby about outlines.
According to Stephen King, “Outlines are the last resource of fiction writers
who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses.” Well, Stephen King, how do
you explain the handwritten outlines of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s
Ghost, Henry Miller’s Tropic of
Capricorn, as well as ones for many other highly regarded texts?
To be honest, I’m terrible at plotting, and for a long time
the E. L. Doctorow doctrine helped me lean into that weakness like it was a
good thing. I valued the mystery of human identity! I could create a
mother-f*cking mood, bitches! But
now, having mentored so many novelists, I understand that, should I attempt to
complete a novel, I’ll probably struggle with plot pacing just like everybody
else does. Writing humbles us that way.
To be or not to be?
Hamlet is such an angsty little dude.
Isn’t the answer always be?
Link:
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Kathy Flann is Associate Professor, English (Creative Writing) at Goucher College
and an award-winning author. She will soon debut a new Imprint with Stay Thirsty Publishing entitled Unblended with a mission to “serve up
stories, fiction and narrative nonfiction, pure of spirit, brimming with
humanity.”
