How to Draw-Out Writing a Novel and some Interesting Software.

There are novelists who write a detailed plot and stick to it come “hell or high water”.
Then there are those who discover the plot as they write.

Then there are those who fence sit.
I have to admit I am a fence sitter when it comes to outlining. I have done a version of the free form effort. I have also written reasonably detailed outlines.

For my soon to be published novel Veiled in Shadows, I started with no outline. In fact for the first few months I was “working” on it I wrote nothing down. That is right nothing, not a word on paper, or on a computer screen. I ran through the whole story in my head.

So how did I go about it? Well I relied on the fact that I (usually) have a good memory. In those months the novel was entirely a mental construct. I began with a central character (Katharina), of mixed German and British ancestry. My initial ideas focussed on Katharina being torn between loyalty to her British father and her German romantic interest (Ebi). I quickly decided how I wanted the story to end and built the plot from there.

Then I wrote a first draft from my memory of the story, then I shelved it because I got really busy in my day job.
Some time later (in fact years later) when I read that draft through I was disgusted at how badly written it was. Yet, I still really liked the characters and the themes of the book.

So that first draft effectively became my outline for an expanded (and hopefully better written) story. In the end I redrafted Shadows another three times before I was happy to share it with Beta-readers.

Fast forward to my WIP, Veiled in Storms. The germination of Storms began as I wrote what was to be a postscript for one of the secondary characters in Shadows. I quickly realised as I thought about it, that that postscript would form the kernel of another whole novel. Surprise, surprise, the postscript got cut from Shadows.

Unlike Veiled, I outlined Storms from the beginning in quite a detailed way. Perhaps because of this things proceeded much more quickly and I soon had half my first draft completed. Then of course the day job and life in general got in the way and I had a temporary hiatus on Storms.

Back in June I talked about going back to the WIP and reassessing it. In the end I decided that what I had written would become largely back story to the main action.
Realities of work, life and trying to finalise Shadows, have meant I have had almost zero time to spend on Storms. I have finally started reoutlining the plot. The story remains essentially the same but the focus has shifted from events to characters.

I hate outlining on paper as a general rule. I find it frustrating hand writing something, only to have to scratch it out and start again. Because of this I have usually developed outlines in rough on an Excel spreadsheet, with more detail in Word documents. A bit cumbersome, and hard to see the whole thing at once but it has worked for me.

For those who are interested I thought I would share a piece of software I have been trying out for my outlining. It is a program called yWriter. YWriter is designed by an Aussie novelist called Simon Haynes (he also happens to be a programmer). It is absolutely free from his website.

What I like about this software is it allows me to plan out the story as a series of scenes that I can shift around from chapter to chapter, or section to section, as I see fit.
It has database functions so you can search scenes or chapters by fields such as character, location, etc. I am so far finding it a useful tool for keeping track of characters and events as I shuffle them around to develop the new outline.

If I choose to I can then use the software as a word processer to basically write the story into the outline.
I imagine in the end I won’t use that feature, but that I will use it to finish forming my outline and then write the next draft in Word.

Now a couple of random photos:

An Australian Magpie.
These guys were named for their similar colouration to English Magpies. They have a beautiful warbling song. They also become terrors in spring, swooping down to drive people away from where they are nesting. I have shed blood more than once after a surprise magpie “bombing”. They were bombing me, I wasn’t illicitly blowing them up (as irritating as they can be).


Roadside hay and silo, Flowerdale Victoria.