Yvonne Navarro | I Am a Terrible Blogger but A Great Outliner

Me? Really?

Writers are supposed to know what to say all the time. They can come up with a story in an instant ("It was a dark and stormy night..."), a humorous speech when they're called upon at a banquet with no advance notice, and a profound, life-changing inscription four seconds after a stranger hands them a book and asks "Would you inscribe this to my brother-in-law and say something he'd like?"

Uh...

When I first agreed to write a blog for FreshFiction.com and then realized the date it would be published was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I knew exactly what I would write about: realizing a dream, or how great it is to be a woman and to be able to write what I want, when I want, and without fear. As the deadline began to nag at me, I started working on it, then continued a couple of days later in the car on the way to a booksigning... only to realize the piece was coming across more as a kind of political column than anything else. Well, that's just not me and it wasn't long (at about the end of three more paragraphs) before I was really unhappy with the whole thing and chucked it right off the computer screen with a couple of words that began with (@# and ended with (*$!.

Back to square one. Say, am I supposed to capitalize that?

So I took a quick look at what other authors have blogged about on FreshFiction, but that didn't help much. Sure, it's informative, but it's not like I can say, "Oh, she wrote about such-and-such, so I'll write about that, too!" Come on, I can be more creative than that. But a funny thing happened on the way to the blog: I came to the realization that although I have a deadline for this blog (something I've learned is essential to my psyche because it forces me to actually get something done), I don't have direction. It's like I need a supervisor to tell me what to do next. That's an awful thing for a writer, because almost every writer I know wants, more than anything, to be self-employed. And when you're self-employed, you are your own supervisor.

At last-- I've found a topic!

Outlining.

I know you're trying to make sense of the way my mind jumps around. Don't. It'll just give you a headache.

I love a good outline, because it's like a good supervisor.

Note that I didn't say I love outlinING, which at its best can be a fun process, or at its worst as pleasant as cleaning your own teeth with a rusty screwdriver. There's nothing quite as good at pulling blood from your eyeballs as staring at a computer cursor sitting solidly on a blank line after the phrase Chapter Five. Add your thoughts spinning in slow motion around the fact that your plot calls for some action and you can't think of a thing to do about it, and you start thinking favorably about that toolbox in the garage and the piece of popcorn stuck in your back molar.

But like any good supervisor, the outline will not go away until it gets what it wants. And when it does, it will make you feel good and make you want to do more. And the more you do, the better the outline, and the more productive you get, and so the more you accomplish. Until voila-- you have a nifty skeleton on which to build your next fabulous (because that's what it will be, right?) novel.

Pah, you're thinking. Lots of people write without outlines. Lots of people do, of course, but more people, more authors, don't. And definitely not me. I need a good supervisor, one who not only gives me a deadline but tells me where to go (in only the nicest way) when I need it. I know this for a fact, because once upon a time I tried my hand at writing a book, the third book in a contract, in a supervisor-free environment. The deadline was past, but that was okay because I had written two media tie-ins for the same publisher instead of working on this book, and therefore they were okay with that. Since it was book number three and I had turned in a good proposal for it, they never asked for an outline like they had for book two (book one had been completed when it was submitted).

So there I was, tra-la-la-ing along in my manuscript, happy as a puppy in a bucket of bacon bits. Typing madly away until I got to page 519 of what would eventually become a 651 page novel (almost 191,000 words-- I am not kidding), when everything came to a dead, dull STOP.

There's an old episode of Twilight Zone (at least, I think it was TZ) where a group of people in a diner interact until things go sour... then do it all over again. And again. It's kind of an early Groundhog Day thing, except that finally, at the end of the episode, all the people in the dinner go outside to finally track down the source of the sound they've been hearing off and on the entire time. The sound, it seems, is The Great Typewriter In The Sky, being driven by The Writer Who Knows Not Where She Is Going With The Story. And in my world-- the one of the book I was working on-- that writer was definitely me. On the ground was a Really Bad Guy, aptly bloody and deservedly dead. Somehow everything in the previous 590 pages had come together in this one sacred instant, an enormous undertaking considering the number of characters, mystery, murder, romance, supernatural powers, and the near-destruction of the planet and civilization itself. Except that the rest of the folks I had written into existence had no idea where to go from there. They stood in a figurative circle and stared up at the sky-- at me-- and I could hear them all asking, "What now?"

I won't repeat my language here lest I offend delicate virtual ears. I managed to finish the book, of course, but like the song by the Blood, Sweat and Tears, I sure did the spinning wheel thing for a nerve-wracking amount of time before figuring things out. Final Impact was published in early 1997, and even had a follow-up novel, Red Shadows, come out at the end of 1998.

But it was the very last novel I ever wrote without a supervisor.