(Dianne) Fox Writes

Yesterday, I came home from a lovely visit with the lovely Anah Crow, in which we crocheted, watched the first couple days of the Olympics, and did tight outlines of the two books that follow Tatterdemalion in the Foundations of Magic trilogy. We also, with the help of our awesome editor (Anne Scott), picked out a back-of-book excerpt for Tatterdemalion, and received an early ARC of Tatterdemalion itself. No cover art yet, but the book isn’t coming out until mid-May!

I promised I’d chart the timeline for the path to publication for this book, and so I shall. But… not today. Today, I’ve been thinking a lot about outlining, and the importance of knowing where you’re going when writing a series that isn’t open-ended.

When Anah and I started writing Tatterdemalion, we knew how it was going to end. We also were under the terrible delusion we could fit it all in one book. Hah! That book would’ve been about 500,000 words long and likely unpublishable. But we wrote it anyway, or started to. We got about halfway through and realized that it was a mess, so we started over (about 6 months later) with the idea of splitting it up into a series of stories. A lot of the details have changed since then (the main character’s age and personality, the love interest, the theme), but the endpoint — the goal — has remained the same.

How we get there, though? Well, that took some doing.

Anah and I had to rewrite Tatterdemalion about fifty bazillion times because we had no outline when we started, and kept realizing things didn’t work as we’d thought they would. So it’s been our goal to NEVER DO THAT AGAIN. Ever. Really.

So back in November, we sat down in her office, me with a spiralbound journal and her with a giant sketchbook, and outlined every single scene in the second book in the series. We named all the important characters, figured out how they fit, and bounced ideas off each other until we had it all nailed down.

Then, when I showed up at her house this past weekend, we realized the outline ended too early. So we sat down again — this time at her dining room table, but me still with the same spiralbound journal and her with that same giant sketchbook — and finished it. We found the happy ending, fleshed out the plot, made it work. And then we decided that we needed to outline the third book, too, because I won’t be able to visit her again until April, and if all goes well, we might be actually writing the third book by April.

The third book was harder to outline. It’s the final book in a trilogy. All the story arcs have to be resolved, all the major questions (and most of the minor ones) have to be answered. I started by making a list of goals for the story, everything we needed to touch on, to make sure the trilogy would actually be finished in three books.

Then we sat back down at the dining room table (kicking out her lovely partner, who had been sorting cards for a boardgame) and went back at it. How do we tackle the emotional growth of the main character and show who and what he’s become over the course of the three books? How do we make sure the relationship arc gets enough time to feel complete while still dealing with the political and magical questions we’ve raised throughout the first two stories? How do we deal with the family issues?

Every scene got talked about, dialogue sketched out, goals for the scenes noted down. And when I left yesterday, we had one complete book awaiting publication and two very detailed outlines ready to write from. Maybe after they’re published, I’ll show you the outlines.

Hopefully, we won’t have to rewrite these two nearly as much as we did the first.