I am pleased to welcome Caitlen Rubino-Bradway, author of Ordinary Magic to the blog today:)
Outlining
~~Caitlen Rubino-Bradway
I’ll admit, I never thought of
myself as an outline person. Outlining
seemed unnecessary and way too detail-oriented.
After all, not every author is a outliner; we each have our own way of
writing, and sometimes that means mapping out every action, and sometimes it
means jumping in headfirst. I actually
love reading author posts on how they write because it’s always so
different. I remember reading one years
ago by a mystery writer who liked to just start writing without any idea of
where the story was going, without even knowing who the murderer was, which
still amazes me. I personally need to
know how the story’s going to end, or else I know it’s destined to wither in
limbo forever. That was how I knew Ordinary
Magic was going to work out, because I knew the ending almost from the
moment I started writing.
Still, I never translated the need
to know what was going to happen into a need to spell everything out
step-by-step. I thought my brain could
just keep track of everything. Of
course, this is the same brain that lets me walk past my sunglasses three times
while I’m on a desperate search for my sunglasses. I just never imagined myself as a ‘work
everything out in meticulous detail’ kind of person.
But my brain did successfully
navigate the story craziness once before.
Specifically with Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, which I wrote
with my mother, and for which I did not have an outline. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and I think
the key part of that sentence is ‘with my mother.’ Who is a lot more detail-oriented than I
am. There were also many, many
conversations about what would happen, and when, and how.
However, I knew I was going to need
some help when, at my first meeting with my editor, she asked me to cut 30k
words. At the time, Ordinary Magic was
a 90k-word behemoth. And she was
completely right — the thing needed to be trimmed down like woah — but holy cow was that a mind-twister. It wasn’t just a matter of trimming the fat,
but involved cutting the A-Plot and making the B-Plot the A-Plot, which
involved converting some of the Old A-Plot into the New A-Plot, and oh my
goodness I needed to sit down and put my head between my knees.
Add to that, I don’t exactly write
in an ‘A to B to C’ way. It’s much more
of an ‘A, and then Q, then F, and maybe a little of L if it’s on my mind,
depending on whatever I’m most interested at the moment’ kind of thing. I find it really helps with sidestepping the
dreaded Writer’s Block issues, though it does present the whole new problem of
Stringing Everything Together Smoothly.
So, for the first time, I sat down
and wrote it all down — what had happened and what needed to happen, what could
stay, what could be cut, and what possibly needed to change. And now I’m completely converted. It’s the first thing I do when I’m starting a
new story. Because the ‘A to Q to F to L’ method works for me, I now need an
outline to help me get the story settled in my head. It’s an invaluable resource when I get overwhelmed
by the details, and it’s a boost for the ego to know I can be meticulous about
this, even if I may or may not remember to sort my laundry into lights and
darks.
Thanks, Ordinary Magic — you
finally made me get organized.
The Book:
The outlook for kids like Abby isn’t bright. Many are cast out by their families, while others are sold to treasure hunters (ordinary kids are impervious to spells and enchantments). Luckily for Abby, her family enrolls her in a school that teaches ordinary kids how to get around in a magical world. But with treasure-hunting kidnappers and carnivorous goblins lurking around every corner, Abby’s biggest problem may not be learning how to be ordinary—it’s whether or not she’s going to survive the school year!
Oh! That sounds like a fun book. (adds to TBR pile) I have to outline because if I don’t have the whole book planned out I know writer’s block will hit me hard and the book will stall and never be finished. But I wouldn’t call myself organized by any means. I have countless notebooks and post-it notes around my apartment. If I want the notes for one story idea then I have to look in three different places to get it. It’s a type of chaos that only makes sense to the creator.
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