Show Notes

Links in this Episode

The Novel Smithy

Free Masterclass on 12 September 2024: How to Outline An Intuitive Story

Beyond Book One

The Essential Book Outline

How to Outline Your Book, with Lewis Jorstad -- Full Episode Transcript

Intro:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas, and this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love. 

Because let's face it, the writing life has its ups and downs, and we want to not just write but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page. 

This podcast is for writers who love books and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who want to learn and grow in their craft and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them. Writers who want to spend more time in that flow state. 

Writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community. In this crazy roller coaster ride, we call the writing life. We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome writer, I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show. 

Rhonda:

Well, hey there, Writer, welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm so glad you're here. Today I've got my friend Lewis with me. 

Lewis Jorstad is an editor and author and a complete story nerd. He teaches up and coming writers the skills they need to write their dream novels. He cares deeply about how stories affect our world. And he's been writing for a long time. He's got a whole series of books on the art of storytelling. And he runs the site The Novel Smithy. 

Also, I learned, I didn't realize this, but you're a complete history nerd. Like you are obsessed with history, right? 

Lewis:

Yeah, it's a problem. Actually, a large portion of my degree was on Chinese history. So China and Asia more broadly, but yeah, it gets me in trouble with my world building because I just go too deep. You're like, oh no, don't forget this when this happens. Yeah, I was like, we have to talk about the political structure and all my readers are like, I don't care. And I'm like, I care. But I care so deeply. 

Rhonda:

Oh, that's so great. I mean, that's the great thing about writing. We get to nerd out on the things that we love. I'm writing a whole novel on like suffragists, you know, like it's- I love it. Go deep on things you love. 

So I wanted to talk to you today about outlining and then also a little bit about writing series and how we approach outlining there. So can you say a little bit about how you approach outlining? Do you think of it in terms of like options or do you have one way that you teach in The Novel Smithy? How do you think about outlining? 

Lewis:

So I am really passionate about what I call intuitive outlining. It's basically, you know, I know that there's a big fight sort of in the writing community of like, are you a pantser, are you a plotter? And like, they don't mix and they don't like each other. And I kind of take issue with those labels. Not that I'm gonna tell people how to identify themselves. If you resonate with that, rock on. 

But I never felt like I fully aligned with either the plotter or the pantser camp because I do need some amount of a plan. 

Rhonda:

Thank you. 

Lewis:

Yeah, I would love to know if this resonates with you because if I sit down to write with no prior planning, I just get lost. I get overwhelmed. The story doesn't move forward and I lose it. But I'm also not the type to sit down and plan every single beat of the story in that very linear sort of rigid fashion that I think is the assumption around what plotting has to look like. because that just kind of sucks the joy out of it. I lose a lot, again, I lose a lot of the energy for the story. 

And so a couple years back, I don't even remember how many years ago it was, I heard a friend in the industry refer to it as being a puzzler. You are not a plotter or a panther, you are a puzzler. I like that, okay. Because you have these, like, you know, you see a couple scenes and a couple characters and you have the puzzle pieces and your process is about how you connect those puzzle pieces together. 

And so that sort of led me on this journey of developing what I call intuitive outlining that is based around that idea of rather than starting with like sitting down with the, you know, however many plot points in the hero's journey and like filling in each one, you start out by sort of going down this path of just exploring the novel and just seeing like where is your brain taking you? What are you getting excited about? 

Speaking of things that you like to nerd out about, like how can you just ideate for a while? and then slowly start to narrow it down a little bit more and a little bit more until you end up with a really well sort of built skeleton of the story that you can then write on. 

And some, you know, you ask like, do I give people options? Some writers make that skeleton really fleshed out. Like they have all the connective tissue, they have, you know, all the skin, like it's very complete. And others are like, I've got four ribs and a spine, I'm good, let's go. And everything in between. But my general advice is, for most of the writers I work with, and especially for me, you need something of that skeleton to work from. You need something to guide you. Otherwise, it's just so easy to get three chapters in and then be like, what am I writing about again? Where am I going with this? 

Rhonda:

I came out of writing short stories and it's really easy to write a short story without an outline. Like you sit down and you start. Because it's so contained. Yeah, it's so contained. It's like 10, 12, 15 pages. You're done. You can hold the whole thing in your head. You can't hold a 400 page or 300 page novel in your head, right? It's just your brain goes: gah! 

So yeah, I love this because I teach something called The Essential Book Outline, which is basically like, how do you ensure that you're following fundamental story structure so that you don't get to the end of the draft and not have a story that works because you didn't have what you call the spine of the story in place. So yeah, super, super important. 

So then what do you do? And I'm totally self-interested now because I'm working on something I hope is a series. And I made the huge mistake, Lewis, I was writing a mystery and I didn't outline it to start. I pantsed a mystery novel. I will never do that again. 

But I'm hoping it might turn into a series. So how is it different to think about the planning for a series versus the planning for a one-off? 

Lewis:

So it is different, but I would argue it's not as different as you might expect. And again, everyone's going to approach this slightly differently. I have a student I work with that is working on a 13-book cozy mystery series, and she has a plan for every single book in the series. She knows what she's going to write all the way through. 

Some people thrive on that, and that's awesome. What I generally recommend though is, kind of like I said, how each book, you kind of need to know the spine. You need to know that like a rough skeleton to guide you. The same is usually true for a series, but with a series, you have a lot more room to kind of flex. And so what you need to know across the whole series is not quite as, there's not quite as much. 

With that said, that depends on the type of series you're writing. So there are different types of series. They follow kind of different rules and best practices for something like a very sort of classic trilogy, you know, fantasy trilogy where like each book connects.

You're basically telling one giant story, but you're telling it across multiple novels. In that case, usually you wanna have a sense of what I call the four crossroads, which are... these pivotal moments that are decisions your character makes that sort of shift to the direction of the story and sort of mark a key moment in their character arc, you're going to have four crossroads in each book, but you're also going to have crossroads across the whole story. 

And so when I work with students who are planning that type of continuous series, I always say, even if you don't know the specifics of the whole series from the outset, you need to know what those four key moments are because those act as waypoints, like as you're developing each book. And then you can go in and just outline each individual book as you go, because you can look ahead and say, but am I building towards that next crossroad to make sure that I'm still on track as I develop the series? 

On the flip side, for something like a mystery, I'm curious, are all of the books really one big story across multiple books, or is it individual stories following like the same protagonist in each one? 

Rhonda:

The latter, yeah: same protagonist and you know, it's the typical like everywhere she goes, somebody's dead. Fortunately, real life is not that way. 

Lewis:

So that is that type of series I refer to as a static series. So in a static series, you're basically creating the same little like, world and situation and characters over and over across each book with just little variations. So like Jack Reacher, very common in thrillers and mysteries. Sherlock Holmes, you know, the character, it's the same basic setup in every book. 

And so in that case, what really makes the series work is the strength of your world and the strength of your protagonist, because that's what your reader is gonna be with in every single book. For writers working on that type of series, from a planning perspective, I make them take a little bit of extra time on that protagonist and on their world. 

But in terms of sort of the plot of the series, what I always ask is, can you, so how many books are you thinking you might wanna write for this series? I know, you know, you might write three and then be like, I have ideas for 10 more, which is awesome. But I always am like, can you give me four or five variations on this setup? So if the setup is she goes to a new town and there's a dead body and she gets involved, can you come up with four or five versions of that you would be interested to write? And if you can't, we have problems. 

But again, it doesn't have to be how she solves the mystery. It doesn't need to be the specifics of who is there or where she is. We just need that little bit of what you will do in future books. Do you have enough ideas to work with? 

Rhonda:

Do you find, working with the novelists that you work with, do you find that you get this experience where you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. You're working along and someone's trying to finish a draft and they're at like 120 to 150, 60,000 words. And suddenly they're like, oh, I think it's a series. It didn't start out as a series. It's just a very big book. And now they're trying to figure out how to turn it into a series. How would you approach that? Because I find that happens like. It's common enough, I would say. Like 30 to 40% of the time. 

Lewis:

Yeah, yeah. Especially, listen. I'm a fantasy writer, and I love my fantasy writers. We are very guilty of that. Right, right. Oh, now that I think of it, every time it's happened with me, it's been a fantasy writer. Yes. We are so guilty of it. Fantasy and some sci-fi. Like, we are bad about letting our books just balloon and balloon because we're like, but what about the side quests. I love the side quests. At least that's my kryptonite. 

What I will say is that it's kind of a non-answer, which I apologize for, because it is kind of case by case. There are definitely some writers I've worked with where they come to me with like a 200,000 word draft. I'm actually thinking of someone right now. And I was talking with her about the story and there were very clear dividing lines in the draft where we very clearly shifted into a new problem, like into a new focus. And that is a very natural place to kind of break the book into a series. 

And so in that case, you know, that's what we ended up doing. We ended up sort of trimming it out, turning it into a slightly shorter three book trilogy and just making some adjustments to the way she sort of ended each section so that they flowed nicely into each other as separate books. 

But I've also had writers come to me with a book that, again, like, 150, 160,000 words and said, well, I think this should become a series. And in talking to them, what I've realized is that it's just one story. Like there's not those clear dividing lines that make me think, oh, this could very well be like the finale of book one or the finale of book two. It's just that the story ballooned so much and there's a lot of fluff. There's a lot of fat that needs to be cut out. Those are the harder ones. But they included their story Bible. 

Rhonda:

Exactly. They included all the backstory. 

Lewis:

And often it's because they started the story too early. So a very common one is, oh, well, my protagonist has this kind of complicated history from when she was in college. But the story is really about her when she's 30 and reconnecting with her high school sweetheart. But we included all of that stuff that happened in college. And that's not what the book is about. 

But it's also not its own book. And so I'll often tell them, like, those are the painful ones, because I'm like, you have to cut 100,000 words, and that sucks. But it makes the book stronger. And what I'll often say is, that is always fodder for a reader magnet. So, you know, for anyone who's not familiar with that term, you know, when you publish your novel, often readers, or often authors will say to readers, hey, if you enjoyed this book, you know, I'll send you a free... prequel or side story or ebola or whatever it may be, if you join my email list. And that's a way that authors kind of build their following. 

That kind of stuff, that cut content is great fodder for really fun reader magnets. And that helps, I find, soften the sting of like, hey, I just chopped out like five years of time out of my novel. And so, yeah, so we're not hitting the delete button, we're cutting it and pasting it somewhere else, we're gonna use it later. Always. 

Rhonda:

I love that. Nothing is ever wasted, but it doesn't mean it should end up in the final story. So speaking of the story Bibles, since you love to nerd out on fantasy, what's your approach to the Story Bible? Like, do you do them? Do you suggest people do them? Do you do them in like a different piece of software? Do you do them as you write the draft? Do you do them later? Like, what's your approach to that? 

Lewis:

So I... That's actually a really fun question. I've actually been working on some stuff related to that this morning, and so it's very top of brain. You know what? We should define the Story Bible in case people are like, what are you talking about? So I'll define the way I do it, but please jump in if you have used the term differently because I wanna make sure it's clear for people. 

I create what I call a two-part outline. My reasoning for that is that your brain needs a different kind of support based on what you're doing. And so I create a scene timeline that is basically, again, that skeleton of the story of like, what are my key scenes? What is sort of the order of events in the novel? 

That doesn't mean I'm filling out every scene. Some scenes are blank, some scenes are like one sentence. It just gives me something to go on as I'm writing and it helps me focus. Cause I can sit down and pull up one scene and I'm like, I don't have to worry about the whole novel. I just have to write this scene. And that's very freeing for my kind of perfectionist brain. But... That is very like in the weeds writing. 

And so for me, a Story Bible is the second part of the outline and that is the big picture. So that's where you have things like, what is your premise? Who is your protagonist? Give me some key details, personality, backstory. What is their harmful belief? What is their character arc? What are their key relationships? That's where you do some, like really important world building facts. And so that's what you go to like, You know, if you're a couple scenes... What are the rules of the magical world? Yeah. That's basically the rules of the story. Okay, yeah. I say that the story, the scene timeline is the what, and the story Bible is the why. 

And so when you're like deep in a draft and you're feeling overwhelmed and you're starting to like feel that, like writer's block creep up, what I often tell people to do is set the timeline aside, set the draft aside, and just spend a day or two with your Story Bible to like remind yourself... Why are these things happening? Why are my characters behaving the way they are? What is my premise? What is my conflict? Why did I make these decisions? Because I find that can often stop the writer's block before it kind of takes over, if that makes sense. 

Rhonda:

It does. And you know what, you're making me think that Story Bible would be super useful beyond fantasy sci-fi because that's where I see it most often, right? Because of the world building elements. 

So... you know, if I'm writing, let's say I'm writing political speculative, well, I've got it, you know, this is how the politics work in this world. This is how the magic works in this world. And I think it can also be really useful as a tool to give to editors, right, for consistent editing. This character's eyes are always green. If I said they were blue at any point, please fix it, you know? Please fix, yeah. It can be helpful as that kind of a tool. 

But the way you're describing it feeds into what you're talking about as the intuitive outline, where you use what your current understanding is of your story world to foster new ideas for scenes. Do I have that right? 

Lewis:

Yeah, I think so. And I make all my writers do it, like if they go through a program with me. Romance, mystery, fantasy, like regardless of genre, because the Story Bible is also – I don't think of it as just world building, if that makes sense. It's also genre research. 

Like, okay, you're writing a romance. What are the conventions of your genre that you wanna make sure you're working in? What tropes do you like? What tropes do you not like and want to poke fun at? You know, it's just that, it's that like, giving yourself that easy way to zoom back out when you're feeling overwhelmed and remind yourself of the bigger picture. Remind yourself why you're writing the story, what your goals are for the story. 

Because so many of the writers I work with, and for me personally, it's just so easy to get to like, usually the like 30 to 40,000 word mark in a draft, at least that's my, that's where I always get stuck. I'll go like 30 to 40,000 words in, and I just kind of forget what I'm trying to write. I've been in it for so long. I'm like, where am I going with this? Why did I ever think this was a good idea? It's that like the second half of Act Two where you're like, what the hell now? Right? Yeah. Like, what is this mess? 

And the Story Bible is just like, it's a reality check. It reminds you where you're headed for the story. 

Rhonda:

I love that. I don't think I've heard anyone use it so comprehensively. So that's really interesting. And I totally might steal that for my mystery series. So I would recommend, and I'm going to put it in the show notes, Lewis has a book called Beyond Book One that talks about outlining and talks about basically structure. for when it comes to a series, right? And how to think about a series. 

So if you are thinking about, oh, maybe my 150,000 word novel is a series, or you're starting book one and you think you might like to have three, four, five in this series, you need that one. Yeah, for sure. 

Lewis:

And what I will also say real quick on Story Bibles, if you're writing a series, your Story Bible is going to be your constant companion because it's also something you add to. So like your point about eye color. As you're writing, you're like, oh, I decided that so and so's little brother is five in this book. I'm gonna go make a quick note for myself. So when you're writing book three and you're like, how old would little Timmy be in this book? You don't have to flip back through book one. You can just open your Story Bible. It's so helpful. 

Rhonda:

Yes, I have all of these. Well, they're servants. It's historical. So they're servants and I need names for all of them. And I'm always like, wait, what's the housekeeper's name again? Like, so yes, I think I need a story Bible and also I definitely need not to pants another mystery. It's like those, you know, the puzzle is so important and I just made it up as I went along. Do not recommend – do not do what I done did. 

So Lewis, tell me a little bit about your journey as a writer. And now that you're teaching writing, what have you learned over the course of teaching writing that now has shifted your own process? 

Lewis:

Can I just sort of wave my hand and say process? Cause that is kind of the answer. Oh, okay. I, so I started way back when, the very beginning of my writing journey, very much like the student. I was like, I have to learn everything. I have to use all the systems. Like I'm blending the hero's journey with Save the Cat and with the three-act structure and with da-da-da-da and Story Grid and this and that because I felt like I was gonna miss something. 

And as I sort of became more experienced and had more experience with my own writing and then started transitioning into teaching others, I very quickly realized that process, having a process that works, all of those systems work. Like Story Grid works for some people, Save the Cat works for some people, Hero's Journey works for some people, but they don't all work at the same time because they ask different things of you. 

Rhonda:

And not for all books.

Lewis:

Exactly. And so what I started to realize, and part of what I mentioned about intuitive outlining has been kind of, I won't say the culmination because I would say it's always. evolving, but is the current culmination of that journey for me around process. That writing a novel, yes, craft matters, understanding craft, understanding best practices, understanding genre, but it can't exist in isolation. It exists as a part of your process. 

And if you don't have a writing process that can support you in making the most of those different things, you end up... really scattered and really overwhelmed because you're trying to grasp everything and it feels like it's always getting away from you. Whereas once you find a process that works, you have that path to walk, you're not as overwhelmed. 

Rhonda:

I think that's so true. One of the things I see a lot of, I'm sure you do too, is, you know, someone comes and they say, I've been working on this book for 10 years. And like, kinda, you kinda have been working on it for 10 years, but also you've been stopping and going and doing this workshop and then stopping and going to that workshop and stopping and reading that book and this book.

And I'm not against workshops or books, I love it, but we do at some point have to find and settle into our own process and it can be informed by pieces – like you know I love the hero's journey for what it says about like the mentor character and allies and you know the leaving behind of the ordinary world and all of that but you can pick and choose, based on your own understanding of who you are as a writer, your process, and the story you're writing right now. 

So, when you talk about intuitive outlining, is it more about your own process as the writer, or is it more about the story, or is it both? 

Lewis:

I think it's a little bit of both. For me, that process really does begin with just letting the story take you wherever it wants. So, you know, I have formalized that process into like steps that you can take. That is, it is repeatable, it is something you can do from, you know, over and over for different stories. 

Just on sort of a philosophical level, it really begins with spending a week or two, or depending on the novel, like spending a month or two if you need it, just putting on some tunes and just like getting into your brain and letting the story wander and not worrying about how it connects. or if it makes sense or if it's gonna work, and just like, where is it taking you? What ideas are coming up? How can you push the edges to see like, could I go farther with this? Could I take this in this direction? 

And then once you have, you basically are building out your raw material. You have all of this stuff now. And then it becomes about, how can you start to make sense of all of that stuff using writing frameworks to create clarity? Not to tell you what the story has to be, but to give you a way to take that jumble of ideas and start to make some order out of them that you could actually then write as a novel. 

So yeah, I think it's a little bit of both. It sort of depends. I love what you said there because I think sometimes I see writers trying to use, let's take the hero's journey, right? And they'll... they'll be like, I think I'm using the hero's journey for my structure, so now I need to make up a character to fit this role, I need a sidekick, I need a villain, and you're like, wait, wait. Which drives me crazy, I'm not gonna lie. Yeah, wait, that's not your story. 

Which don't get me wrong, I am all about letting structure inspire you. When I'm working on a novel, if I'm sitting there and I'm like, hey, I'm missing this really critical scene based on the process that I use. I'm gonna make myself sit down and really look, like, what could I do for that scene because I know the story needs it. But I always try to start with what I already have rather than making something up and just trying to like plug it into the story because often that won't fit or it will take a lot of work and massaging to make it fit, especially with characters, because it's so easy to just every time you need someone to just add a character. 

But in my editor brain versus my writer brain, my editor brain is like, the best novels have the smallest cast possible to tell the story properly. Because when characters have multiple roles, suddenly they're much more dynamic, they have much more depth. So if you're just inserting people, like we got a problem, you know? Yeah. 

And also when it comes from the character, the logic of the story is sound. You don't end up with the same amount of sort of gaps and weird things and like, oh, I don't think that would happen kind of situations, you know? So... We want to avoid Tom Bombadil at all costs. Tom Bombadil, a character famously from The Lord of the Rings, that shows up for like two chapters, makes absolutely no logical sense in the story. Tolkien basically says he's like an eldritch god, and then we never revisit it. He just never shows up again. 

Rhonda:

Oh, that's great. Oops. Ah, you know, what are you going to do?  So fun. 

So you have an event coming up that is about your approach to outlining. Can you just say a little bit about it? 

Lewis:

So, yes, I am going to be teaching in early September. I'm pretty sure it's going to be September 12th, but so that I don't date this episode, we're going to leave it uncertain in case it has to change. Mid-ish September. I'm going to be teaching a free master class, appropriately called How to Outline an Intuitive Story. 

And it is basically going to take people through both kind of the philosophy of this, so a little bit of what we talked about here, but getting more specific into some of the components that I really, really lean on for that outlining process. 

So for instance, one of them, what I call the universal story, is the idea that your story is not your plot. And if you are trying to plot your novel first, it is never going to feel like it makes sense. because you don't know why that plot is happening. And so figuring out that universal story of like those other core components so that then you can build a plot on the back of that is one of the things we're gonna talk about. 

But we're also gonna talk about some mistakes that I see writers make and also sort of the timeline of, hey, if I was sitting down to work on a new novel, where does this process fit and what is the kind of timeline? Because listen, it's easy to say like, oh, outlining is great. And I've had a lot of students who've been outlining for five years and not actually writing, and that's not the goal. Like outlining works when it is quick and it moves you forward. And so we're gonna talk about the timeline of how you do that towards the end. 

Rhonda:

I'm so glad you said that because I think people do get tripped up and they have the world's best, shiniest, brightest outline and no finished books. So yeah, okay, great. So that is how to outline the intuitive novel. And you're going to give me a link we're gonna put in the show notes. And so folks can join that free masterclass in September. 

So thank you so much. If you're listening to it after you've missed it, you'll have to go to Lewis's site. I'll put that in the show notes as well and see what else he's got planned. But thank you so much for this, Lewis. It was really great to kind of dive a little deeper into this really important craft topic. And thanks so much. 

Lewis:

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Outro:

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