Exercise #26: Not-Outlines for the Half-Known World

Robert Boswell, Rachel Yoder, Lauren Groff, Lincoln Michel, Cinderella, Game of Thrones, Jane Austen, Spider-Man, Miciah Bay Gault, Brian K. Vaughn, Fiona Staples.

Hi friends,

I’m now three weeks deep into the spring semester at ASU, where I’m teaching an advanced undergrad workshop and a generative novel-writing workshop for MFA students. Both courses are fun, but the novel-writing class is one that’s especially close to my heart: for as long as I’ve been a professor, I’ve taught it every two years or so, and each time it’s a little different, building upon what went well last time and upon what I’ve learned in my own practice since the last go-around. This month’s exercise comes from something I tried this semester for the first time: it offers a few ways to build a scaffolding for plotting a novel (or a short story) without feeling like you have to have a full, highly detailed outline before you begin.

My craft book Refuse to Be Done comes out next month, on March 8! In my next newsletter, I’ll share the details of my book tour (which will include both in-person and virtual events, and conversational events as well as workshops), but for now I’ll just say that it’s never too late to pre-order the book, if you’re interested. Thanks to all of you who already have your copy reserved!

As always, I hope your writing goes well this month, and that you and yours are happy and healthy. Enjoy this month’s exercise, be safe, be kind, and have fun with your reading and writing!

Yours,
Matt

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What I’m Reading:

Goodnight Stranger by Miciah Bay Gault. I fell in love with this novel as soon as I read its fantastic opening, a promise of what’s to come that’s mysterious but not withholding, with characters already in obviously fraught relationships:

Baby B was our brother, and he’d been dead all our lives. For a long time I thought I’d see him again, but by the time I was twenty-eight, I believed that the dead stay dead. I knew that the space he left in our lives would have to be filled in other ways.

Saga #55. It’s been a long wait for Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples to resume putting out new issues of Saga, but I’m so glad it’s back after a three-year hiatus. My absolute favorite ongoing comic series. Can’t wait to see where this goes next. (Although my heart’s still broken from #54…)

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Exercise #26: Not-Outlines for the Half-Known World

My novel-writing course is designed as a generative workshop, which means I ask students to start from zero and write a significant portion of a new novel draft, rather than bring in an existing manuscript. Some semesters, this is an ambush: students sign up for the standard graduate workshop and show up to learn they’re writing a novel. Other semesters (like this one), students know in advance what they’re getting into. In either case, I tell students that they don’t need to know anything about the book they’re going to write in order to begin: they don’t need to write a word in advance, they don’t need an outline, they don’t even need to know what the novel they’re writing is about. Not yet.

There’s nothing wrong with starting with a full outline, of course, but I never have: I do outline, but not in the generative, exploratory first draft. In fact, I think in many ways it’s best for me to begin and proceed from what Robert Boswell, in his essay “The Half-Known World,” calls a kind of “half-knowledge”:

I have grown to understand narrative as a form of contemplation, a complex and seemingly incongruous way of thinking. I come to know my stories by writing my way into them. I focus on the characters without trying to attach significance to their actions. I do not look for symbols. For as long as I can, I remain purposely blind to the machinery of the story and only partially cognizant of the world the story creates… What I see is always dwarfed by what I cannot know. What the characters come to understand never surpasses that which they cannot grasp. The world remains half-known.

This may (or may not!) sound appealing as an ideal! (Some of you may even now be running away in terror.) But even if you want your novel’s world to be mysterious and “half-known” for as long as possible, it may still be helpful to have at least some idea of what to write next as you proceed. Here are some alternative “not-outlines” that might gently guide you through the earliest stages of your draft, as you discover what novel it is that you’re writing.

First is the logline, a term borrowed from screenwriting: a one-sentence description of the plot of your novel. There are many ways to approach the logline, but I think the following three formulas can be completed even before you’ve written a word:

■      A single sentence with an ironic twist

–      A once-excited new mother, abandoned by her husband and dissatisfied with her life, turns into a wild dog every night

■      A single sentence that includes a protagonist, a goal, an inciting incident and a conflict

–      When Marie is exiled to a distant English abbey by the French queen she loves, she’ll do whatever it takes to gain the power she needs to earn back the life and the love she knows she deserves

–      When his baseball star brother mysteriously dies at bat, cybernetically enhanced Monsanto Mets scout Kobo must thwart the shadowy plots of out-of-control pharmaceutical companies and reincarnated Neanderthals to solve his brother’s murder before Game 7 of the World Series

■      A single sentence that includes a Character, a Conflict, and a Clock

–      Cinderella must meet and fall in love with her prince before the stroke of midnight, at which time her gown will turn to rags

(These describe, in order: Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, Lauren Groff’s Matrix, Lincoln Michel’s The Body Scout, and the climax of the fairy tale Cinderella.)

The benefit of these loglines is that they tend to clarify the ground stakes of the story by identifying both the status quo of the world of the novel before the plot begins—the world that would continue indefinitely if the inciting incident never occurred—and also what the inciting incident is. Marie’s exile and Kobo’s brother’s death, for instance, are incredibly clear: without those events, the story never happens. Once they’ve occurred, there’s no way to go back to what was, at least not without massive amounts of denial. (Which might also be a novel.) This information alone can carry you through a first act.

A second kind of not-outline might be a question that is both central to the novel and that each major character would answer differently. This question could be philosophical or intellectual, but it could also be entirely practical. After Robert Baratheon is murdered in Game of Thrones, for instance, there are suddenly a dozen answers to the question, "Who should be the next king of Westeros?" Answering that question took eight seasons on HBO and twenty-five years of George R.R. Martin's life (and in book form, at least, it remains unsolved, despite the thousands of pages devoted so far to arriving at its answer).

When working with this kind of not-outline, you might need to invent a new character every time you come up with a new answer to your question. You might also create new conflicts by putting characters with different answers into scenes with each other, where they will inevitably clash. Doing so will keep you writing, keep you inventing.

A third not-outline can be generated by stating the theme of your novel (as you understand it right now) as clearly as possible in an early scene, possibly in dialogue. Once on the page, this thematic statement becomes a hypothesis about the world that can be tested and proved/disproved by the novel that follows. One example might be the opening of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which begins, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Or it could be Peter Parker's Uncle Ben telling soon-to-be Spider-Man that "with great power there must also come great responsibility." In writing such a novel, many of the scenes will necessarily touch upon this central theme; likewise, characters may live their lives by its suggestion, or flee from what it asks of them, or even directly oppose the thematic statement's worldview.

Your exercise this month is to choose one or more of the above kinds of "outlines" to write for whatever it is you’re drafting, even if it’s a short story, even/especially if you're trying to avoid outlining. These not-outlines are all intended to suggest ways to proceed with the writing of your novel without needing advance knowledge of its full plot or its final structure. As you write onward, you may find you need to continually revise your not-outline as you go: your theme-as-hypothesis, for instance, may prove false even to yourself as you explore, or a clearer version of it might emerge. Move toward the mysteries these not-outlines suggest, then continue on into the next mysteries your drafting reveals.

Good luck! See you next month!

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Matt Bell’s novel Appleseed was published Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in March 2022 from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

His website can be found at www.mattbell.com.