An outlining question

[Christa M. Miller]

Those of you who don't outline - do you prefer to use extensive character background work?

Those of you who do - do you also use extensive character work?

I noticed while working out an outline for the new novel that my character backgrounds are more sketches than full profiles. I know with the last one, I discovered a lot about the characters as the plot unfolded. So I don't mind so much that I don't know the characters that well going into this novel - I have an outline.

That might seem bass ackwards, but I think of it as getting to know a person the way you would IRL - you don't know everything about them from the outset, but with some people, you can kind of see where their lives are going. Sometimes they do what you expect; other times they don't, and the surprise is what makes it interesting.

Thoughts?

[I. J. Parker]

Not at all pretentious, Jeffrey. I think you are quite right. I have not worked like that since I used to do scholarly writing and then the outline was crucial and made the writing easy.
The same should be true of the novel, but I haven't been able to do this of late. I want to let the story tell itself and am afraid I'll miss the sudden insights that happen serendipitously as you write a scene. Outlining is such a dry exercise and better for being unemotional, but it tends to be uninspired.

[Eric Eckert]

Jude brings up an interesting idea regarding screenwriting -- something I've been wondering about. I took a screenwriting class, and we had to write out dialogue and character sketches prior to writing the screenplay. Although the sketches always seemed to change somewhat as the characters evolved during the writing process, I had something to go back to if I felt I was writing in the wrong direction.

Another thing the professor promoted was writing the scenes out individually on index cards. Once that was done, you could tack them to a board or move them around to make them fit. I have scenes and dialogue in my head that might not happen for 200 pages, but I want to make sure I have them down before I forget them. I think this process (or a form of this process) can be helpful with multiple (or complex) story lines, and I plan to incorporate this exercise into the writing of my current novel.

[Olen Steinhauer]

I'm with those who don't do any kind of character sketch beforehand. Character is action, and so the idea of coming up with elaborate histories and backgrounds seems beside the point. Characters act their part in the story, and only then do I think--"Someone who does THIS must necessarily have had THAT kind of background." By then it's an interplay between character and action, if you know what I mean.

That said, the real truth of writing is that the rules are never constant, are they? I have attempted character backgrounds as a kind of exercise, but find them too horribly boring to actually complete unless that background is part of the present-tense story. With my last book this happened, and that background storyline became the "big secret" of the novel. So what do I know?

[JackBludis]

I'm pretty much the same as Olen. You introduce a character, you have a general idea who he or she is, he or she acts in certain ways, and the background is revealed in context.

I always thought that those character outlines that some writing instructors and textbook writers want writers to complete are like filling out a questionaire on someone I don't know yet, but will soon get to know.

When I start with the generality, the specific fills in pretty quickly. I usually know only a few things before I begin to write about a character: the obvious character traits, the general description, one very specific goal, and one or more specific qualities, whether the character developed those over a lifetime or discovers them while facing the problems of the story.

Jack Bludis

[I. J. Parker]

Olen's example about wondering about a character's background after the fact just happened to me. After setting out to show the brutal mayhem created by an assassin, I reached the end of the book realizing that he was my only flat character, an arch villain. Alas! Cannot have that. Must give him the sort of background that made him what he is.

Quite right, Olen.

[helen black]

I do the whole shooting match - character biogs and outline. I love the planning stages of a book which is why my poor editor is waiting for my promised draft and I'm fannying about on Crime Space.

[Neil White]

I do full plot outlines, with scene-by-scene summaries. The outline gives me a journey, and like all journeys, sometimes you take a detour, but you never get lost if you know the destination.