Yay! Good luck with that.

Mark,

Thanks, I’ll add him to the list. Who knows, maybe another Canadian author I’ll like? (IIRC Richler is Canadian.)

Tinatsu,

Yeah, but at the same time, I wonder if it might not make it easier for me to sh*t out things closer to the form I need them to be in? :) I guess I’ll be finding out. I think looser outlines will be useful, and very tight ones will kill me, anyway.

Also, interestingly, in an offlist discussion, David suggested to me maybe outlining would be very useful for me. He even suggesting trying outlining something and getting the outline critted.

For stories I’m having trouble revising, I already do produce rough outlines of the current version (a list of scenes and what pertinent information/characterization/events happen in each) and then look at what I can change or adjust in the outline to fix the story. (Sometimes I use it while revising, too, though sometimes I junk it and keep just the important changes in my head.)

Outlining stories (etc) that I like/admire is a good idea. I think I’ll do a few of those as exercises this month. Actually, a novel would be a good one to do. Maybe one of these Nick Mamatas novels I just got… Thanks!

10% of the way through a novel right now (the steampunk vampire thing I mentioned over e-mail a while back), tentatively entitled “City of Blood and Clockwork.” Granted, it’s YA, so at that length 10% of the way through is only 6K, but it seems to have some momentum to it, and I’m cautiously optimistic. I’m certainly hoping to be done with it by winter break.

Love in the Ruins? I only know the Percy Walker.

Well, for me, I think outlining would save me massive amounts of time. For any piece I write that’s 5,000 words long, the usual deal is that I write 12,000 and then have to agonize about which 6,000 to cut, and how to imply the good parts of what I’ve cut by adding no more than 1,000 words. (The other 2000 words are cut just with line edits and so on.)

As for novels — I’ve been through drafting and I can get maybe 30,000-40,000 words in without needing an outline. After that, though, I start to get lost, and lose sense of where the story needs to go.

I can see how China Mountain Zhang might have been writable without an outline, because there’s a lot of shifting between characters. I’m less worried about my current lack of outline for A Killing in Burma for the same reason — I can pick up and leave off with characters and as long as I have a vague idea of what’s to come, it all keeps moving forward.

The other novel draft I have sitting around, though, the ghost story of the dead white dude in Korea, shows some wear and strain at the spot where I struggled to figure out where the story was supposed to go. (Likewise with “McWar” — the crits very clearly revealsed just how transparently that moment of struggle showed through, though in that case, because I was writing to a deadline, I wasn’t surprised.)

Hm. Anyway, I know that for me, long stuff with a single character needs an outline, and even long stuff with multiple characters can. (My Korean superheroes novel was very multi-POV but it fell apart without one.)

Anyway… by the way, I’ve been wondering whether you’re thinking of getting into the novel business. It seems a lot of people are thinking about it, or edging their way in that direction. You?

Um….why? I mean, maybe this would be useful for you and maybe not, but this certainly isn’t a universal maxim of good writing or anything.

In Winsconsin, Maureen McHugh told me some writers she knows outline novels (including her now) and some (including her when she was writing her best known stuff) don’t, she didn’t know of *any* writers who outlined for short stories. When I told her that Paul Park said he outlines his short stories (although he doesn’t outline his novels), she seemed genuinely suprirsed.