For January: A heist featuring a drifter named Stove and a posse of mean-spirited hoboes only she can see.
Archive for the 'outlining' Category
In preparation for next month’s draft, I am outlining a story loosely based around the Baba Yaga / Hansel and Gretel stories, in which a teenage boy (rather than a girl, as in Vasilisa the Beautiful, or a brother and sister as in Hansel and Gretel) with a difficult relationship with his father (rather than stepmother) discovers a hermit (rather than crone) living in the north woods and decides that he and the hermit are modern-day Cossacks: wild men, raiders and runaways from the serfdom (as it seems when you’re sixteen) of modern life. As Vasyl crawls deeper and deeper into this fantasy, he fails to consider that the hermit may have his own agenda.
By coincidence, Nadya Lev at Coilhouse also has Baba Yaga on her mind this week. (Perhaps she is also menaced by eerie, spindly buckthorn limbs spontaneously uprooting themselves and forming knobby matted fortresses in the woods surrounding her house?) The Bilibin illustration in her post is the same one that inspired me to start work on the Vasyl story a few weeks ago.
My kids are off at the State Fair with my parents, so it’s fitting that I’m working on the outline for September’s story, which starts there:
On a visit to the Minnesota State Fair, ten-year-old Al runs off from her parents. Lost, she wanders into the Coliseum, where she discovers a twenty-foot-tall ram about to be slaughtered before a roaring crowd. She frees the ram and the two of them make a run for it– following the Burlington Northern tracks west-northwest toward the mountains, pursued by the furious Butcher and his thirsty knife.
Near Frazee, she escapes by climbing up the ram’s horn until she reaches the moon, where she finds that the Man in the Moon and his dairy herd are being menaced by a deadly shadow.
Near Surrey, she climbs down the ram’s fleece until she reaches the center of the Earth, and she will be forced to remain there forever unless she can fetch the Devil a glass of ice water.
Near Bainville, she flees by running around the ram until she reaches the kingdom of Srivijaya*. There she catches a glimpse of the Butcher, who is there himself on a dark errand.
On the bank of the Two Medicine River just outside Browning, she and the Butcher will fight a final battle for ram’s life– and her own.
*I took a globe, stuck my finger on Bainville, spun the globe 180 degrees, ran down into the southern hemisphere, and found that I hit Palembang, Sumatra. A quick Googling showed that Palembang was once the capital of the Tantric Buddhist maritime empire of Srivijaya… and that sounded like good fairy-tale fodder to me, so I grabbed it.
This is my first time keeping strictly to Syd Field’s four-chunk formula of Act I, Act IIA up to the midpoint, Act IIB from the midpoint to the reveal, and Act III. When I wrote the outline for the Pismo story, I was just taking for granted that the four-chunk thing would work for me—it seemed reasonable, but it was still basically an act of faith.
I have to say, though, that both last week while writing the midpoint and today while writing the reveal, I felt the chunk-break transitions so strongly that it almost seemed like I should stick my arms in the air and yell “Woo!” I hope at least a little of that exhilaration manages to trickle through to the reader…
The good news: I wrote the first two scenes of the Pismo story today.
The bad news: I only wrote the first two scenes of the Pismo story today. There are fifty-six scenes in the outline and thirty days in June. That means I need to write an average of two scenes a day. Two scenes today: I haven’t banked any scenes for busier days to come.
The first scene was easy. I had already given it a lot of thought. The second was maddening. In my outline, I had written, “Exposition: describe the restaurant,” which wasn’t nearly enough meat for an entire scene. A sentence, maybe. I spent half an hour or so writing elaborate curses to myself until I invented enough business to build a scene around. I imagine that will happen a lot. Some of my outline notes are easy to write to; others not so much.
I also transcribed a few scenes from the longhand draft of the troll story using Dragon Naturally Speaking, which worked incredibly well. I used an earlier version of the software in the mid-1990’s to transcribe a book’s worth of interviews when tendinitis kept me from typing. Ten years seem to have brought lots of speed and accuracy improvements. Typing my longhand drafts is a chore. Dictating seems to take most of the sting out of it.