WRITERS: ARE YOU MAKING THIS COMMON BOOK-PLANNING MISTAKE?
image: under drawing of van Ruysdael's Landscape with Deer Hunters, infrared image and tracing prepared by LACMA conservation center
Why blueprints bite you in the butt when planning novels
Thinking about outlining as if you are building a house is a reasonable metaphor. After all, a book is somewhat like a building, in that you must lay your foundation (write your first draft) before you start decorating (polishing your prose).
However, if you outline your novel like an architect creates a blueprint, it often ends up causing huge headaches halfway through the draft.
You’re not dying, Cameron, you just trapped yourself with your outline
Architects have constraints that writers don't:
Gravity needs to be accounted for with load-bearing walls
Changing partway through construction causes disaster
The result must match the original model precisely
Writers, however are more like painters, and shifting your mindset in this direction makes planning your draft much more enjoyable, and useful.
Lithograph of pencil study for “Before the Class,” Degas.
Novels come into focus more like paintings.
When an artist begins working on a painting, they make a great number of sketches to try out various composition options. Once they're ready to begin on the canvas, the first step is a sketch.
In pencil.
Unlike architecture, painting plans are made to be flexible and changeable. A painter knows that once color begins to fill the canvas, new insight may mean changing the picture.
In painting, you learn as you work, and what you learn may lead to a more satisfying result.
When writing your novel, placing your characters in scenes and watching them interact over time is often the best way to clarify questions in the plot. Novels don't collapse like buildings without bearing walls if you move a scene somewhere more satisfying.
And most helpful of all, the sketches painters make live hidden underneath the final result. It takes special equipment to peer under the layers of paint to see what the artist thought at the beginning, as the LA County Art Museum (LACMA) conservation department has done above.
Blueprints can be referenced later and are often kept on file, and architects need to adhere to them. As a writer, you don’t.
Your plans can be your secret forever.
Is the dancer on the left sticking out her tongue now? Hmmm. That wasn’t in the sketch
What if your novel plan was a living document that could breathe and move and evolve as you wrote?
Stalling out in the middle is just as often the result of a suffocating plan as with anything else. If you're struggling, ask yourself if you're trying to force your book to match a plan that needs updating.
You don't need to know everything about your story from day one.
Leave room to learn and discover along the way - that's part of the fun of writing.
If you knew no one would ever see your plans and you could change as you went, how would that shift your process at the moment? Start there.
Ready to write without a blueprint holding you back? I made this guide for you.