In Literature class, we were forced to write book and movie reports and one of the assignments we had to always turn in first was an outline.
And we hated it. Or at least I did. I was never one who could work with an outline or make one. I always had to write my paper and then muddle though the outline and hoped it looked good to the teacher. While outlining wasn't something that I understood in a classroom setting writing formal papers, it is something I find useful when writing creatively. If I'm not sure what should come next in a story or scene, I stop and start making a quick outline of what's happening and what I want to happen. A road map from point A to D but not sure how to start B or link it to C. While I call this 'outlining', what I'm really doing is making a list of events and brainstorming ideas while I'm compiling it. In an upcoming chapter of CatDragon tentatively called 'Free Runners', Team CatDragon must play a game in which each team member must complete a task before the other member can start until all the tasks are completed. When I started writing, I only had two scenes planed out: the opening -setting up the teams before the game is explained- and the closing -Cassandra takes one of her coins back from Lecosi, thus making him focus on her for the rest of the story. I didn't know what game they would be playing, I didn't know what tasks the team had to complete, nor how it would be completed. I only knew how I wanted to start and where I wanted it to end and what Cassandra's motivations were and how Lecosi would react to them. Many people would have panicked and I certainly didn't know where to start. This also was an assignment for screenwriting, thus I had other criteria to meet. It had to be 30 pages, it had to have a beginning, a climax, a fall, and a conclusion. It had to have three acts which also had a beginning, a climax, a fall and conclusion. The script had to be self contained while also introducing all the elements that had already been established in CatDragon without being wordy or forced. In a nutshell, the script had to explain everything to a man in his mid 40's who did not know anything about my comic. It was a very difficult task. I stressed for weeks over this and had nothing to show for it but a looming due date. Thankfully, I knew a few things that would immediately help me out. First, I work better and freer with pen and paper. I am dyslexic and a bit of a perfectionist thanks to my mother. I developed a habit as a child to erase, erase, erase, and erase. I cannot spell to save my life, and I feel compelled to fix any red squiggles that pop up in a word document. With pen and paper, I can't erase or revise till I'm done writing, thus speeding up my writing process and there's nothing visually to interrupt my mental flow. Second, in Literature class, we studied various brain storming methods to help with writer's block. One of these methods was simply jotting the first things to come to mind down. This method is called 'topic brainstorming' and is meant, of course, to think of a topic to write a paper about. For this story, I used it very differently. To keep things neat and organized, I turned what was usually written into a large blob of text into a list, each word it's own line. It looked something like this:
The next task was to take what I had written, pick from it what words I liked best, and organize it with what I already had to make an outline with it. Amazingly, the ideas came to me and the outline helped me to further decide which CatDragon team member would be doing what and how his/her section would progress. Thus it became:
The other three scenes and the conclusion play out the same way, each taking the necessary character point of view as the teams play through the game until we reach the climax of the story that sets up a rivalry between Cassandra and Lecosi for it's own story. To this day, this is how I write stories when I'm stuck. |
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