I will be writing a novel-in-a-month in June. This is the second time I’ll be tackling this particular novel, so in an effort to keep myself from deciding three years from now to redo it again, I decided to write a brief plot treatment. This is a narrative of what happens in the novel chapter by chapter. It was hard, especially for me, but I’m astonished at how much it’s helped.
The way that I write is often very much by the seat of my pants. I’ll have an idea, an image, a character, and a couple of sentences–sometimes less–when I sit down to write. I discover the words as I’m writing them and am often surprised by the way things come together at the end. I’m even more often surprised by the way they don’t, of course, but that comes with not knowing where I’m going when I type “Chapter One.”
I often write quantitatively–racking up the word count as much and quickly as possible–before I write for quality. I’ll edit a short story several times, often paring down hundreds or even thousands of words or rewriting large sections, as part of my process of discovering what the story is really about (something I probably should have known before I wrote it). With a story of even a few thousand words, that’s a time-consuming process, especially if the number of rewritings is ten or more, and if they take place several months apart from each other. With a novel, I just didn’t want to go through all the pain.
Perhaps it is surprising that a person who meticulously outlines an academic essay down to the contents of each paragraph would not take the same care with her fiction; but I like to defy expectations. For the first time ever, I know my whole novel before I’ve written any parts of it. That thing that happens in chapter six that the characters didn’t know was important? It will become essential knowledge in chapter eleven. And what the bad guy alludes to in chapter three? It resurfaces in chapters eight and twelve. Plus, I have every character already named!
I feel a little silly to be so excited about discovering the ins and outs of the plot of the novel with my own name on the byline, but I usually complete a manuscript first and then wade through all the structural problems caused by the beginning not matching the ending. That shouldn’t happen this time.
In short, a light bulb has switched on over my head.
Writing the novel before you write it is a novel idea indeed.
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