From plot to draft
In a previous post, I explained how I started thinking about the book and how I did the first steps researching the story. Today, we will finish the first version of the outline. This does not mean that this will be the whole book’s story. The outline is just the starting point when I’m creating a plot.
Dictation
After the first rough outline is done, I’ll print it out, hold it in front of me, and start dictating a rough first draft of the whole story. If possible, without stopping, all the way through. For the books in this series, this takes a few hours of concentrated dictating. If I dictate about 3000 words an hour, I can write one of the 12,000 word Rosemary books in about 4 hours of work. Add a few breaks and pauses, and a few wrong turns in the story, and I can still get it done in less than a typical working day. The first (dictated) draft of Nuclear! took me around 5 hours of dictation.
When I dictate, I take the rough outline as a first guide, or a skeleton of the story structure; but I don’t stick to it. For me, the best ideas come when I close my eyes, lean back, and completely lose myself in the story that plays out in my mind. What I dictate is just what I see and think about, and sometimes this will go off the outline significantly. I like it when the story does this. It means that the characters come to life and start doing things on their own. As long as I find a way to return to the main points of the outline, this is fine. I often end up having a lot more text than I need. The first Summer Island draft, for example, had over 22,000 words, when I needed only 12,000. I will cut all the superfluous words during editing. But I prefer it this way. I find it easier to cut words and scenes out than to have to add padding to a text that is too short.
Back to the outline
So let’s go back to the outline of the book. In the last post, we ended with this:
- Arrival at the mission (fly over the Amazon)
- The mission. The problems (gold digging, bad laws, corruption, illegal logging by big companies, taking away the Y’s land!
- In the mission hospital, they meet a young boy from the tribe and take care of him.
- They meet his father, who is coming to pick him up, and they all talk. Father invites them to see the Shabono.
- They visit his home: the Shabono
- Illegal loggers approach and start cutting trees. Fight, but the Y cannot win.
- They all discuss what to do. R&M have an idea. Instead of openly fighting, why not do it stealthily?
- They steal tools and send them back to the headquarters of the company in the capital (where they are useless).
- They put petrol into the diesel tanks of equipment.
- Together with the tribe, they block the trucks.
This is a first, very rough outline. It identifies the main story line, the protagonists, the villains, the sidekicks. It contains the main plot points. But it still needs a lot of refinement, reversals, and characterisation. Let’s dig into it!
Structure
If you analyse contemporary kids’ series, you will see that the most successful ones (for example, the Rainbow Fairy series) all have a very clear outline. It goes something like this:
- Introduction. The characters are introduced. References to other volumes and the backstory.
- The problem arises. The bad guy or bad thing appears.
- Identification of what needs to be done.
- Coming up with solutions.
- Execution, climax, twist, surprises, and finally success.
- Happy end, reward.
This is a good structure for kids. For my target audience (6-10 years old), the plots can’t be too complex, or the readers will not understand what’s happening. Even the brightest children are not initially used to reading stories, and it’s an effort for them to understand the motivations of characters, whether they are good or bad, and how they relate to each other. So the plot must be painted in broad strokes that clearly identify the good and the bad ones.
Since the books are 12,000 words long, each part averages 2,000 words. Of course, the Introduction and the Happy End will be shorter, perhaps only 500-1000 words each. The Execution part will be longer, perhaps 3000 words. But these are just averages, so we don’t need to stick too closely to them.
The dark side
One advantage of the series format is that the readers already know and love the main characters (else they wouldn’t read the third book in the series). So we don’t need to put much effort into portraying them. On the other hand, children tend to sympathise with every character, even (initially) the villains. So the book must very clearly state that these are the bad, bad, bad guys, or we risk being misunderstood. There can be surprises and reversals, but at any point in the story the contrast between the good ones and the bad ones must be clearly visible.
So we should add a few scenes clearly showing that the baddies are really bad. For example, how they attack and cut down the trees, and how they treat the locals like slaves, forcing them to work in the illegal logging business. Of course, this can’t be too graphic for our audience, but all children know cruelty and injustice. We must find a way to have the story resonate with what they already know and understand without scaring or freaking them out.
English speaking
A smaller problem, but one that must be addressed, is the language barrier. Rose and Mary speak English, and it’s not believable that they would speak Greek or Arabic (needed in Summer Island) or the language of the Yanomami. The Yanomami, on the other hand, don’t like foreigners, and prefer to stay among themselves. So they’re not likely to speak English either. What to do?
Enter the Christian mission. Mary’s father is a missionary, temporarily filling in the post until a long-term priest for the mission can be found. And what do missions do? They have hospitals, and they have schools. And the school would teach English, among other things.
Now the Yanomami wouldn’t be crazy about sending their kids to learn English, but it is plausible that some of the parents in the community might see the value of it, especially considering their trouble with the loggers. To communicate with police and the media, they’d need to speak something other than their own language. So a few of them let their kids take English classes in the mission school. And so we now have a translator in our story: the Yanomami boy who will become friends with Rose and Mary.
(Children are excellent at learning languages, by the way. In Summer Island it’s Aysha, the Arab refugee girl, who fills in the interpreter role).
The first structured plot
So let’s add the content we have into the structure template.
1. Introduction. The characters are introduced. References to other volumes and the backstory.
– Arrival at the mission (fly over the Amazon)
2. The problem arises. The bad guy or bad thing appears.
– The mission. The problems (gold digging, bad laws, corruption, illegal logging by big companies, taking away the Y’s land!
– All the Y are taken as working slaves; they have to work for the logging company until they collapse. They are forced to work at gunpoint.
– In the mission hospital, they meet a young boy from the tribe and take care of him. He speaks English (from the mission school).
– They meet his father, who is coming to pick him up, and they all talk. Father invites them to see the Shabono.
– They visit his home: the Shabono
3. Identification of what needs to be done.
– Illegal loggers approach and start cutting trees. Fight, but the Y cannot win.
– They all discuss what to do. R&M have an idea. Instead of openly fighting, why not do it stealthily?
4. Coming up with solutions.
5. Execution, climax, twist, surprises, and finally success.
– They steal tools and send them back to the headquarters of the company in the capital (where they are useless).
– They put petrol into the diesel tanks of equipment.
– Together with the tribe, they block the trucks.
6. Happy end, reward.
– Party.
How does this look now?
We can immediately see that it’s too slow in the beginning. We’ll be halfway through the book until something interesting happens. And the actual “fighting” of the kids against the injustice only takes place in chapter 4. So we’ll need to add some spice to the first chapters, or we’ll lose our readers. No kid wants three chapters of rainforest description before anything happens!
Coming up with suspense
I also found (in the first book, Nuclear!) that the sequence of (1) coming up with solutions, and (2) executing them, tends to make for a very boring book. Because after the first step the reader already knows what will happen, and then he or she actually watches it happen.
So it is essential that there are lots of surprises that make the plan work out very differently from how it was originally conceived; or one might skip the “coming up with solutions” part and go directly for the execution, showing the reader what the plan is (instead of talking about it first).
In the next post we will improve the outline a bit and move to a more detailed phase outline.
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