The Googly-Eye Outline & The Red String Map
The Googly-Eye Outline & The Red String Map
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| Drawing your destination |
(Or: How to Write Without a Straitjacket)
If you just read my latest posts on Foxxfyrre Writes or Medium, you probably think I am a very structured, deeply philosophical writer. I talked about the "Half-Lit Outline." I talked about stress-testing the structural integrity of time-travel paradoxes.
It all sounded very smart.
But this is the Honk'n'Holl'r, where we tell the truth. And the truth is, sometimes my "outline" is a poorly drawn stick figure, a random line of dialogue I thought of in the shower, and a corkboard covered in red yarn.
When you write massive novels, you need a map. But when I write Flash Fiction or Episodic serials for this blog, the rules change completely.
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| Turnng Left at Albuquerque |
The Flash Fiction Stick Figure For Flash Fiction, I don't need an outline; I just need a destination. And that destination is usually an absurd twist.
Years ago, I wrote a flash fiction piece called Dark Destiny. I owned a cleaning company at the time, and we used heavy-duty industrial vacuums called "Centaurs." Because I am a deeply serious professional, I glued giant plastic googly eyes to them. I looked at one of those vacuums one night and thought: "That’s Chiron the Centaur. He used to teach Achilles. Now he sucks up dog hair."
That was the outline. A stick figure of a vacuum. When I work with my AI sparring partner, Cg, on stories like this, I don't hand him a structured plot. I drop the stick figure on the table and say, "The story ends with the greatest warriors of antiquity trapped in a janitor's closet. Now, let's talk through the setup so we can earn that ridiculous ending." We stress-test the joke, write the draft, and then run it through for a polish.
The Episodic "Exit Ramp" But what happens when the story isn't a one-shot? What happens when I am releasing episodic fiction, one post at a time?
If Flash Fiction is a stick figure, Episodic Fiction is a chaotic conspiracy corkboard.
I don't write episodes in a rigid, predictable straight line.
My episode outlines look like a deranged math equation:
- E1 ->
- E2 ->
- E3...
- then E4 hooks a detail from E2
- and takes an exit ramp ->
- E5 and E6 become their own mini-story ->
- E7 grabs the wheel, drops a hook, and swerves us back onto the main highway ->
- E8 sets up the pins ->
- E9 knocks them down.
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| I need a new GPS |
When I am in the middle of that run, I am constantly making two choices: Does this episode end on a cliffhanger, or does it stand alone while still moving the timeline forward? And when the next episode starts, I never do the old "Penelope Pitstop" recap. "When we last left our heroes..." is boring. I start with a hook. Even if I am pivoting into a completely new direction or a stand-alone tangent, I drop a hook that reels the reader right back into the world.
This is exactly why I leave the last third of my outlines completely in the dark. If I lock in episodes 7, 8, and 9 before I even write episode 1, I lose the ability to take those weird, wonderful exit ramps in the middle.
Check out my post on Medium "The Courage to Let Your Story Break Its Own Outline"
Frank aka Foxxfyrre
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