The Outline Blues: Too Specific for My Story

I'm a plotter. An architect writer, a planner, an outliner, whatever you want to call we who write out the plot of the story before creating the rough draft.

My usual method is to write a list of scenes in the order that I want to write them. Sometimes the scenes I write out are detailed, but often it's just something like, "3. Bryn meets Al in chapel, discuss red herring, realize they have the MacGuffin and plan to return.'

This list of to-do's works for me. I rewrite the list as I go along: my current WIP is on the second draft of the outline because I decided a third of the way through writing the rough draft that I needed a cattle raid in the middle of the story and wanted the salt-crises to happen before Christmas. The list also now has arrows pointing between scenes to indicate the moving of clues and all sorts of notes written up the sides and in-between scene designations: "Find bleached sign as clue. (Take Hilley to Magdeburg, get present.)" That sort of thing. The list is a chaotic, living document; frequently changing and full of cross-outs.

But that isn't quite what they teach you in writing classes. They have specialized outlines with specific titles. There are a multitude of these to choose from: Save the Cat, Freitag's Pyramid, The Hero's Journey, The Three Act Structure, etc.

I figured I would have an easier time with the pacing of my story if I tried out one of these.

Picking which one, for me at least, was easy:

Hero's Journey and Save the Cat suffer from fancy-name syndrome. What the hell is 'the belly of the beast' and why does it have to come after "meeting the maiden?" Freitag's thing-er-ma-bob I can't parse for the life of me. Or remember the name! Most of the others were too vague.

It was the Three Act Structure for me: Inciting incident and 1st Plot point is self-explanatory. The second pinch point should come after the first one because that is how numbers work.

So, for my next story, the one I have the plot-behind-the-plot for and a fair idea of who-all the players are, I went to a writing blog and copied out the outline template with space to put in what particulars the hook, set-up, etc. will be.

I immediately ran into a problem. It's a murder mystery. A stranger is murdered in Meiser and dumped into the trash pit of the inn by the woods. That means that the hook and inciting incident are, you guessed it, Brynhild hears about a dead body by the inn by the woods. Those aren't separate any more than my arm is separate from my bicep. The percentage marks involved are 1% and 1.5%.

Then there is the definition of pinch point versus plot point. It's handy to think 'ok, the murderer is going to lie at the plot point,' but that could also be part of the set-up. My investigators are going to be talking to the murderer all through out. There will be a bit of a twist at the end- the murderer and the mastermind will present a legal and ethical conundrum- so it will make sense to make getting ready for the climax separate from the confrontation. However, it will take some thinking to make this outline work for my particular story as the definitions are too specific (must be at 37% mark, raising of stakes.)

The plot points are also too general. It doesn't work for a murder mystery for your protagonists to figure out what the big point of the conflict is at the midpoint. The big theme and central point of the conflict is part of the climax by genre definition. It's part of why I'm not a fan of Save the Cat: the theme is supposed to be stated at the 16% mark, and if I state my theme at that point, the murderer will be obvious for the rest of the story.

I propose to use this template as a jumping off point. In a lot of ways, they are all going to have to be. Novels are a variable artform that has to take advantage of the elbow room it gives we story-tellers. Or perhaps I'll make the midpoint and the 2nd pinch point make sense as two scenes, instead of the pretty obvious one.

Carrying on, hope all of you are more comfortable with your templates.