Yesterday I was hit with a wave of anxiety as I stared at a massive project looming in front of me. I stopped working, ate lunch, then didn’t do anything writing wise the rest of the day. It’s all documented in this post.

I did, however, go to Office Max and pick up four notebooks — three composition notebooks and one notebook of graph paper. Character notes go into one notebook, setting notes go into a second notebook, and conflict/plot notes go into a third notebook. The graph paper is for any maps I might need to make. So far, it’s empty.

Today, I’ve been working on the outline. Not a bullet-point outline or a scene outline — not so formal — but what you might call a treatment. I started telling the story in a free-flowing way. I’m not worried about how many books there will be, or anything like that. I just want to get the story down. I’ve been moving back and forth between the three notebooks, focusing mostly on plot and conflicts, and creating characters and settings as I move through the treatment.

I’m trying to keep the process very creative, summarizing without going into detail, focusing on my hero’s motives, using Wilhelm’s Law to move beyond the cliches, not building too much, but, rather, trying to keep things very open-ended.

So far, it’s been great fun.

Why am I using pen and paper for this process?

I don’t really know myself. I was beginning to feel rather frustrated brainstorming on the computer. A computer document is a liner thing. You can’t draw lines between ideas, you can’t scribble in the margins, you can’t suddenly put a chart the document without formatting the damn thing to make it work — and even then it doesn’t work right — you can’t draw little maps, or anything like that. But old-fashioned pens and notebooks seems to provide the kind of flexible creativity that’s needed to outline/brainstorm a novel.

Now, back to work.

Yep, that’s the question, all right. What the hell have I gotten myself into?

Some background:

Three years ago, I took Holly Lisle’s How To Think Sideways online novel-writing course. Early in the course, Holly has an exercise about how to get ideas. You tell yourself what kind of story you want to write, and then you wait for the ideas to start coming. So you say: I want to write a 70,000-word mystery novel, and then you go about your life and sooner or later, your subconscious will start sending up ideas. She has a bunch of tips on how to keep at it until you get an idea you really like.

I’ve tried this method, but it never seemed to work for me … until now.

Last week, fed up with my writing, I figuratively swept every idea I ever had off the table and started anew. First thing I did was a massive subconscious exercise, doing all sorts of free writing and list making to figure out what interests me — the big and the small, the serious and the trivial.

During this exercises, I answered a question that went like this: If you could write anything and know you wouldn’t fail, what would you write?

I won’t give you my entire answer, but here’s the important part:

I’m not so much interested in being a great writer of stand-alone books. I want to create a series that people love. Think: Dragonlance, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Spenser, Harry Bosch, Forgotten Realms, The Wheel of Time, The Lord of the Rings, The Dark Tower, and so forth. I want to create a massive intellectual property I can play in for years and years to come.

And what has happened? That’s what happened!

Last night, as I was dozing off, I had one of those, “that’s it!” moments … and the next thing I knew, I was outlining a seven-book series in my head … and I was seeing all sorts of ways about how I could take my idea and run with it.

Did I get up and start writing these ideas down? Hell no! It was 12:45 in my morning! It was way past my bed-time! I really wanted to go to sleep. So I thought, Well, if I remember all this stuff tomorrow morning, I’ll run with it.

And guess what: I remembered it.

<deep breath>

So now what?

I don’t know. Writing a massive seven-book series was the last thing I wanted to do. I’m not sure I’m ready to do anything like it. And yet … I’m super-excited about the project. I just need to get my head around what I’m doing … and what I need to do … and what this project will demand of me … and … and …

… and since it’s lunchtime, I’m going to go and eat. It’s always better to think on a full stomach. I’m a hobbit, in that way.

PS: Comments are open on this post if you want to pass on words of sympathy.

Nothing much to report. Yesterday I worked on my characters. First, I thought about my cast of characters, then I began to focus in on my hero.

One thing I’ve tried to do during this process is to keep it all very creative. I’ve written down all sorts of possibilities. I’ve resisted setting anything in stone too early in the game. I’ve tried not to overbuilding anything — not the plot, not the setting, and certainly not the characters.

On the other hand, the more you understand story structure, the easier it is to see where your story is headed, the easier it is to plan and build your story.

This lesson is, so far, the biggest one I’ve learned.

When I started this process, I had nothing. Zilch. Not one idea. But after several hours of brainstorming, I had a few ideas, and as I collided those ideas, a story began to take shape. When I stepped back and looked at it, I saw the shape … and the shape seemed to fit within a structure. Once I saw the structure my story suggested, I was able to shape it and build it more quickly. And it didn’t seemed forced, either.

Let me explain it in a different way. Years ago, I read a very good book on story structure called The Screenwriter’s Workbook by Syd Field. In it, he tells you how to build a three-act story. Not understanding that a three-act structure is only one structure, I got to work. (I should say, the three-act structure is essential for movies, but novels can use all sorts of structures and get along just fine.) I don’t recall what the story was, only that I was constantly forcing my story to fit this certain mode. When I finally got the outline, it wasn’t anything like the idea that first excited me … nor was it a story I wanted to tell. So I threw the project in the garbage.

This time, I didn’t even consider structure until I had a basic beginning, middle, and end, until I had a genre, and until I knew the basic character arc of my hero. Once I had those things, I saw the shape of my story … and so I knew which structure would work best.

Story structure and story genre also tell you what characters you need in your story. For example, if you’re writing a boy-meets-girl romance, you should have another girl/boy that temps one of your protagonists and threatens their relationship. If you don’t have this character, writing a convincing boy-meets-girl romance novel with compelling try/fail cycles is going to be difficult.

Or take a murder mystery. You must have red herring characters. You can’t write a convincing murder mystery without three or four alternative suspects for your detective to investigate. So when planning your murder mystery, you have to think about these red herring characters, how they’re connected to the victim, and give them solid motives for why they’d want the victim dead.

Well, what I did on Sunday was look at my story and think about what kind of characters I would need to tell this story correctly. Surprisingly, this took longer than I thought, mostly because I had no idea what I was doing. It wasn’t until I looked at a few books on outlining and story structure that I began to grasp why I was looking at a blank screen.

Once I accepted that my story fit a basic structure … that it was in a certain genre … and that my hero needed a certain character arc … was I able to start making a list of characters I’d need.

And surprisingly, things began to snap into place.

Today, it’s all character work.

*

If you’re wondering why I’m writing these long posts about taking an idea to a novel outline, here’s the reason: I want to keep track of the process — of what works, and what doesn’t — so that, hopefully, I can streamline it the next time around. At least as much as that is possible.

I spent Saturday thinking about my villain. I already had an idea of my hero’s antagonist, but nothing solid. So I started the day by asking two questions: 1) What does my villain want? and 2) What’s my villain’s relationship to my hero?

Using Wilhelm’s Law, I started writing down ideas as they popped into my head. Of course, the first three were banal, general, and often cliches. Once I got those cleared out of the way, I was forced to actually think. It didn’t take long for some cool, original ideas to pop up.

And wow — once I answered those two questions, things began snapping in place quite nicely. I opened a new document and spent 20 minutes summarizing what I had in about 350 words. And what did I have? A solid setting, a solid backstory, and the basic conflict between my hero and my villain.

For the first time in this process I feel I actually have something. Not just a bunch of cool yet disparate ideas, but a foundation on which to build. Part of me actually thought about not doing anything more and just start writing, but I decided to hold it off for various reasons.

Today, Sunday, I’ll be thinking about my characters.

If you’re wondering why I’m writing these long posts about taking an idea to a novel outline, here’s the reason: I want to keep track of the process — of what works, and what doesn’t — so that, hopefully, I can streamline it the next time around. At least as much as that is possible.

*

Yesterday, I spent most of my day brainstorming characters, setting, and conflicts — the three most important elements of a story. However, in terms of brainstorming, it’s probably best to begin with setting. Why? Because both characters and conflicts grow out of setting. I found the more I fleshed out my setting, the more plot ideas I had.

Also, I worked on the basic plot. This can be done in various ways, but I was interested in coming up with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Just a sentence or two about each, nothing in any grand detail. The point of this exercise was to get a basic structure in my head.

I’ve found the best ideas come when you have lots of small ideas bouncing around in your head. What I realized throughout this exercise is that it’s not so much about coming up with a lot of big ideas, but just a bunch of small ones that explode into something much larger when they hit. In this case, the whole is five, ten, twenty times larger than its parts.

Finally, I realized something I’d never thought of before: The villain must have a story, too. The villain has his own objective he’s trying to achieve, and you can’t forget it.

But it can be easy to forget because so often a story is told from the hero’s POV. Think of Harry Potter. I don’t know how many chapters there are in the seven books, but less than a half dozen are told from a POV other than Harry’s. And yet, Voldemort is on the move, acting, pursuing his own goals throughout. Or what about The Lord of the Rings? Sauron is little more than a stationary red eyeball, and since we’re heavy into the heroes’ POV, it’s hard to remember that Sauron is acting. Those Dark Riders have to come from somewhere, right?

On the other hand, there’s James Patterson, who begins all of his Alex Cross novels with the villain. In fact, we’re in the villain’s POV second only to Cross’s POV. We know exactly what the villain is doing. That’s what makes those novels so suspenseful. Of course, that’s how suspense is created: it’s not withholding information from the reader, it’s telling the reader what’s waiting for the hero.

At any rate, I know what I’ll be doing over the weekend: Thinking a lot about my villain — or antagonist, if you prefer that word — about his goals and how my hero threatens them.