Okay, I’ve got the char­ac­ter, set­ting and ini­tial sit­u­a­tion. Is that all I need to start writ­ing a novel? What about out­lin­ing? What about writ­ing scenes on index cards? Who’s dri­ving this ship, anyway?

And the answer is, of course, the story is dri­ving the ship.

This is dif­fer­ent from how I usu­ally work. His­tor­i­cally, I’ve been an out­liner, a plan­ner. I’ve been the kind of writer who writes char­ac­ter sketches, out­lines the scenes in ever chap­ter and gen­er­ally spends so much time research­ing and “devel­op­ing” a story that I never get around to actu­ally writ­ing it.

NaNoW­riMo makes that mode of sto­ry­telling almost impos­si­ble. The over­rid­ing require­ment to get 50,000 words in one month, over 1,667 words a day, every day, makes such plan­ning an impos­si­bly expen­sive use of my writ­ing time. Because keep in mind, I have a day job and a social life, and will not be putting either on hold for NaNoWriMo.

For­tu­nately, metic­u­lous plan­ning isn’t the only way to tell a story. My other option is the fossil.

I’ve talked about this before. In his excel­lent On Writ­ing–and if you’re seri­ous about writ­ing and you haven’t read this, you really should, no mat­ter what you think of King as a writer – Stephen King likens sto­ries to found things, like fos­sils in the ground. Writ­ers don’t invent sto­ries as much as we uncover the sto­ries that were already there, lying qui­etly in our minds. The really good writ­ers don’t break very much dig­ging it up.

King starts all of his nov­els much as I’m start­ing Sins of the Moth­ers. He has a sit­u­a­tion in mind, a char­ac­ter or two, and sets events in motion. Like a lot of writ­ers, I’m sure he has an intu­itive feel for where to start the action, but once it starts, he just keeps ask­ing “and then what?” until the story plays itself out in his word proces­sor. He says that only rarely does he have a def­i­nite end­ing in mind.

I’m doing things a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ently. I do know where I’m going to end the story, but only vaguely. I have a sense of sup­port­ing char­ac­ters, both pro­tag­o­nist and antag­o­nist, and what their moti­va­tions are. And I have a basic sense of how the story has to start. Here’s my “out­line” for lack of a bet­ter word.

  • Start with Sophie learn­ing about the end of the Neme­sis war and the destruc­tion of Earth.
  • Sophie learns that the Sendeni plan to kill her rather than fig­ure out what to do with her.
  • Sophie goes on the run.
  • Sophie meets up with some male Sendeni, and is able through her tele­pathic abil­i­ties to com­mu­ni­cate with them in a rudi­men­tary way. I don’t know yet why they don’t just kill her on sight or why they decide to hide her.
  • A whole bunch of stuff hap­pens, dur­ing which Sophie becomes a rev­o­lu­tion­ary leader for the male Sendeni.
  • Sophie is killed, maybe in bat­tle, maybe assas­si­nated. The story will tell me which.
  • Sophie’s lieu­tenants pick up where she left off and achieve their independence.

So you can see, I have a pretty clear big pic­ture view of the first act, from the open­ing to Sophie join­ing forces with the males. I have a less clear but still rel­a­tively solid view of what act three has to con­tain. I have no gor­ram idea at all what will com­prise act two, the bulk of the novel. Basi­cally, I know where I’m going for my first 10,000 words and my last 20,000, but the 40-​50k in the mid­dle is a com­plete mys­tery to me.

And that’s as it should be. Between Heaven and Hell was rig­or­ously plot­ted, down to 3 – 5 major scenes per chap­ter, 20 chap­ters per “book”. In a lot of ways, I wrote it like I was struc­tur­ing a 3-​season run of a TV show, because I was read­ing a lot of writ­ing advice from Joe Straczyn­ski at the time about how he did Baby­lon 5 and that’s all I had to go on as far as how to actu­ally do this stuff. Since then, I’ve writ­ten “Do Over!”, a novella, and nearly com­pleted two nov­els: Mis­taken Iden­tity, the sequel to Between Heaven and Hell and the start of the Neme­sis War, and Home­world, my Mars novel I wrote for NaNoW­riMo 2006. In writ­ing all of these I’ve learned that my instincts as a sto­ry­teller trump plot. The last ten thou­sand words or so of Between Heaven and Hell veered wildly from my out­line because by then the story had me in its grip and I was just rac­ing to write it all down. I got into that zone a lot ear­lier in Mis­taken Iden­tity, veer­ing off track into a much bet­ter story than I had planned about 30,000 words in, and slipped into that intu­itive mode almost right off the bat with Home­world, because NaNoW­riMo doesn’t give you time to plot.

In ret­ro­spect, this shouldn’t have been a sur­prise. When I was a lit­tle kid, we’re talk­ing maybe six or seven, teach­ers used to pull me out of class and take me up to the fifth and sixth grade class­rooms. I’d stand there in front of a class full of kids over one and half times my age and ad lib fairy tells, com­plete with morals, right off the top of my head. I was born with a storyteller’s instincts, a fun­da­men­tal under­stand­ing of Plato’s three act struc­ture before I ever knew who the heck Plato was. And story is story, there’s no dif­fer­ence between a five minute oral fairy tale and a 100,000 word novel. Each is a frac­tal reflec­tion of the other, and that frac­tal image is etched into my DNA.

Between now and Novem­ber first, I’m doing every­thing I can to make sure I have a solid foun­da­tion upon which to build. I’m going to know as much about Sophie and the ini­tial con­di­tions of the novel as I can. I’m going to know as much about the Sendeni and their cul­ture and gov­ern­ment as I can. I’m going to craft a solid open­ing line. But no bat­tle plan sur­vives con­tact with the enemy, and no out­line surives con­tact with the man­u­script. Once I start writ­ing, all this prep work drops away and it’s on.

All I need to do is get out of the story’s way as I’m writ­ing it down.