This isn’t the place to start reading this series. If you’re interested in how I develop ideas into stories, and then into outlines, and then into drafts, head back and start at part one, then work your way forward until you end up here. Kind of like the snake swallowing its tail thing, the beginning is also the ending. Or maybe not.
Anyway, I wanted to use this post to talk about the differences between the outline and the draft of chapter one of The Ruthless Dead. It helps if you’ve read them both (and I want you to read the draft, because I think it’s kick-ass cool and hope you feel the same), but it’s not necessary as I’m going to spell out the differences here to be thorough, because I’m kind of OCD like that.
The outline is just a list of facts, spelling out what happens, in roughly chronological order, with other stuff thrown in that I need (like the notes about Yehennu, or clear tattoo ink). There’s no dialog, no urgency, no style to the writing — it’s just there.
The draft is obviously the start of a story. There’s tension, character insights, details about the environment and the world John inhabits.
But those are the obvious differences when going from outline to draft. I also don’t hold myself rigidly to the outline. I have to be adaptable and flexible to go with the flow if the momentum of the story (and yes, stories do have a momentum of their own) heads off on a tangent, or different direction than where I thought it was going.
So what else is different?
For one, there’s a discussion with the governor mentioned in the outline that never occurs in the draft. There just didn’t seem to be a need for it when I got to writing, and trying to shoehorn in a character who would never been seen again wasn’t a good idea, so it got jettisoned.
Lavernius Jackson, the ICE agent who first takes on the demon, gets fleshed out. In the outline, I don’t think I had ever planned for us to “see” the character of the agent who almost got possessed. He was going to be mentioned, but not on stage. But as I was writing, I realized that to increase the stakes — to make the danger seem more real to John — we had to hear in more detail what happened to the first guy who battled the demon. Hence the need for Lavernius to have a name, physical description, a slight bit of background, and some dialog.
The other change you’ll notice is that the chapter doesn’t end in the draft where it does in the outline. That happens with me a lot. What seems like a good place for a chapter break in the outline doesn’t work at all when I get down to writing. As I said, I have to follow the momentum of the story.
I’ve written up to chapter eleven in the outline, but in the draft I’m on chapter seventeen, so you see what I mean when I say this happens a lot. Chapter breaks are hard to figure out in advance, so they’re usually the change I make most often.
The details are the fun part to write when I get to the draft. I get to fill in all the blanks — how people look, where they live, how magic and demons function in this world, snappy dialog. That, to me, is where the real joy is, and getting lots of the plot mechanics worked out ahead of time allows me to really focus on those things as I write.
As I said, this works for me, but for other writers this method is a step below DEATH. They would hate to know so much detail in advance. But that’s why we’re all different, and have different stories to tell.
