Hi there! Did you have a good weekend?  I hope so! Before we get down to writing today, let’s announce the winner of our Friday book giveaway!

 Congratulations, Gayle Kolodny Cole!  You’ve won a signed copy of SEE YOU AT HARRY’S by Jo Knowles. Email me your name and address (kmessner at kate messner dot com) to receive your book.  And Jo’s Monday Morning Warm-Up for the day is here!

Today’s Mini-Lesson Monday post features two guest authors — Jody Feldman and Rosanne Parry — who are going to talk about how and where to get ideas for writing projects. So it’s a choose-your-own assignment week; feel free to work on the assignment that resonates most with you, or combine ideas from both to generate some ideas this week.

Jody Feldman blames her 7th grade English teacher (justly or not) for turning her away from writing, yet the world mysteriously led her back. She is the author of The Seventh Level and The Gollywhopper Games. Coming: Gollywhopper 2 & 3 (HarperCollins/Greenwillow). You can find her at www.jodyfeldman.com and she’s @jodyfeldman on Twitter.

MINING IDEAS FROM THIN AIR

When I was a kid, I originally concluded I was incapable of Important Thoughts. Being naturally competitive, though, I didn’t let my internal conversation stop there. I learned how to mine ideas from what often seems to be thin air.
 
Because it’s as simple (and as difficult) as opening your eyes and ears and instincts, and consciously noting what’s happening both around you and inside your mind, I offer four suggestions – practices I’ve integrated into my everyday life.
 
1. Extend your dreams. Even if it means setting your alarm several minutes early, lie in bed and hold on to that semi-sleep state. Grab an image from your mind. Assign it to a character. See what new ideas evolve while you’re still hazy.
 
2. Reading a new book? Pause right in the middle of the story. How would you end it? Is your ending satisfying? Dig deeper. Think of another road to travel. Is your ending different? Try building a separate story around it.
 
3. Go to a public place. Observe. Watch that guy use a tissue after he sneezes. Imagine, instead, if he wiped his nose on his sleeve. On his bare arm. On a napkin from his lunchmate’s tray. What if he sneezed out fire? Or was propelled upward? Let your mind run with the possibilities.
 
4. Get in touch with your mini adrenaline rushes. What makes your ears perk? What raises your creative antennae? Go to any bookshelf and look at the titles. Which words stir your insides, have you wondering about the story? Visit any museum – art, history, science. What objects stop you? Make you take a second look? Follow those thoughts.

Today: Get inspired by a single word.

Assignment: Go to the random noun generator: http://www.wordgenerator.net/noun-generator.php
The first word that pops up is yours for the day. You have two choices:

• Brainstorm:Generate a full page of plot ideas with that noun at the center of yourthoughts. Need a boost? Add in a second word.
• Dive in: Let your noun kickstart a piece of writing. The word generator, for example, gave me expansion. My first, raw thought:

Whenever Parker caught sight of the Four Springs Expansion Bridge, he always gasped a little.

          Funny.  Now I want to know why.

Speaking of expansion, for an expanded version of this mini-lesson, email me, jody@jodyfeldman.com

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Guest author Rosanne Parry’s titles include SECOND FIDDLE, HEART OF A SHEPHERD, and DADDY’S HOME. Rosanne was born in Oak Park, IL and lived just a mile or so from the childhood home of an author named Ernest Hemingway. I moved away from Oak Park when she was five and grew up in Portland, Oregon, where she lives now. When she’s not writing, she likes to play the violin. She can also juggle, and is learning to tango, but cannot throw a frisbee to save her life.

STORY HUNTING

Thanks Kate for the invitation to join summer writing camp! I’ve been eagerly following along as my deadlines allow and enjoying the conversation immensely. It makes me miss teaching full time.

But here’s what I don’t miss—giving a writing assignment and hearing a high-pitched wail from the back of the room, “But I can’t think of anything to write!!!”  The distress that accompanies the lament is absolutely genuine, but it can take a lot of teacher energy to get that doubting writing to give his or her story a try.  But to be fair, most adult writers do quite a lot of (hopefully internal) wailing before choosing a setting, characters, and plot for a new story.  Part of the answer lies in believing you have good ideas. I do a workshop for kids called Story Hunting to help them generate a bank of story ideas to draw on. This is a variation of that workshop geared more for adult writers of fiction and memoir.

The idea is to generate a bank of story ideas to draw on in future writing projects, so don’t worry about having a story in mind for everything on the list. Generate the list and then let it spark story ideas over time. The important thing is to generate more ideas in the bank than you will ever use. It takes the pressure off because you aren’t looking for one perfect idea, just a whole bunch of ones that are personally appealing and can be combined in ways that make for a story only you can tell. Pull out a pencil and find a blank page in your journal. If you don’t get to ten ideas in a category, leave yourself some space and come back to it in a few days. If you’re on a roll, you are more than welcome to go beyond ten.

Setting Bank

1. List ten places that you have lived in your lifetime. It need not be 10 different towns. Different places in one town are fine. Summer camp, visits to grandma, college dorm, basic training—they all count as places you’ve lived

2. List ten places to which you feel a strong emotional connection. The emotion can be positive or negative. Either is powerful. (it’s okay to have repeats in the bank. That can tell you something useful about where your heart lives.)

3. List ten places you’ve visited on vacation or places you’d love to visit in your lifetime were money and time no object.

4. List ten places from which your ancestors or in-laws come.

5. List ten books or movies that have settings you’ve found particularly captivating. (you may want to include a brief note about what attracted you to the setting.)

 Here is your “bank” of 50 setting seeds which are likely to be fruitful in your own writing. Use them as a jumping off place for deciding where to set your next story. For example, I listed Paris under #2 and #3 so I made it the setting for part of Second Fiddle. The combination of emotional connection and first hand experience made it easy to write about with both warmth and realism.

Character Bank

6. List ten jobs whether paying or volunteer that you’ve done in your life.

7. List ten famous people, historical or contemporary, that you would love to share a meal with.

8. List ten ethnicities, religions, tribes, cultural groups, gender or sexual orientations, or political philosophies that are represented in your extended family.

9. List ten people who can make you laugh.

10. Complete this sentence ten times. “I’ve always wanted to _____ like ____________. For example, Dance like Gene Kelley.

Here is your bank of 50 character seeds. None of them is a fully developed character but used in combination, they can help you develop a rich and complex character that is likely to resonate with you. For example, I have always wanted to be able to rope a calf from horseback like my college roommate could. And many years ago I met a Quaker midwife who told me that once during a particularly difficult labor and delivery she had a vision of the Virgin Mary helping her. She didn’t convert to Catholicism or anything, but she did gain an insight into a religious experience that had previously felt very foreign to her. I drew on my friendship with a ranch girl and this intriguing blend of Quaker and Catholic experience to craft the characters in Heart of a Shepherd.

 Thanks, Rosanne and Jody, for these GREAT ideas to generate more ideas!!

Last week, I wrote a bit about critique groups — and after I blogged, a whole bunch of super-smart writers popped in to  offer tips and leave comments about how their critique groups work. If you haven’t already read that post, you should go check it out before you continue reading here.

Now…does a critique group sound like something you’d like to try?  If the answer is “no” or “mmm…not right now,” that’s totally fine, and you can skip the rest of this post or come back to it another time. But for those who do feel like this is something you’d like to do,  I thought we’d use today’s post to start the process of setting up some groups.  Here’s what I suggest…

If you’d like to start a critique group where you live, or an online group, leave a comment here with the following information:

• Your name
• Where you are in your writing life: (beginner, long-time poet, working on 1st novel, agented nonfiction writer, etc.)
• What you’re working on now or what you most want to write: (YA fantasy, MG mystery, picture book biographies, professional books, poetry, etc. Or you can say not sure – a little of everything.)
• Where you live if you’re hoping for an in-person group, or just “Online” if you think connected via email will work out better.  Or share both if you’re open to either of those.

(Remember that in-person critique groups actually go someplace to meet and eat brownies and drink coffee once or twice a month, while online groups do all their critiquing and commenting via email or Google docs or something like that. Sometimes, they eat brownies while they do this, too. Just not in the same city.)

If you’re intrigued by all this, but you’re not the kind of person who likes to start things, then you can just hang out and see if anyone posts a request for critique partners in your city, or if anyone who shares your passion for memoir is looking to form a group. If you see a comment from someone you’d like to chat with about forming a group, then reply to it and figure out how you’d like to continue the conversation (email, Facebook, etc.) to work out details.  Then I’d suggest you arrange to swap just a few pages of something for a sample critique, so that you can see how it works out and figure out if you’re compatible in this way. (You can read this piece I wrote for Stenhouse to get ideas on how to offer good feedback.)

Please don’t get stressed about this ,okay? If no one answers your request right way, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer or that you smell like onions or anything else. Give it some time, and if this doesn’t work to connect you with someone like-minded, we’ll find another way.

Once you’re connected with a maybe-critique-buddy, try it out. See how it goes. And understand that this is not a perfect science. Critique groups have fits and starts, growing pains, and bumps in the road, so it may take a few tries before you connect with someone who is the right match. It’s worth it, though. You’ll get great feedback on your writing,  you’ll learn a lot from critiquing your partners’ writing, and you’ll come away with some ideas that you can share in the classroom or library with kids who are trying to help one another improve their writing, too.

Ready  to round up some critique partners?  Fire away in the comments! Remember that the point is to find one another here and then trot off to email or Facebook or Google to talk amongst yourselves and decide how you want your group to work.  There’s a good number of authors planning to visit for Q and A Wednesday this week, so if you end up with more questions about critique buddies, be sure to ask for their thoughts.

It’s time to celebrate all that we’ve worked on this week! And we’re going to do that with another book giveaway.

SEE YOU AT HARRY’S by Jo Knowles (of Monday Morning Warm-up fame!) is recommended for ages 10 and up, and it’s a beautiful tearjerker of a book that will  have you laughing on one page and sobbing on the next.

Enter to win a signed copy of SEE YOU AT HARRY’S by Jo Knowles by leaving any comment that adds to the conversation today. Deadline is 11pm EST Saturday. I’ll do a drawing over the weekend, and a winner will be announced on Monday.

So how’s it going this week? Friday Writing Happy Hour is a chance to relax and share comments about our progress, goals, accomplishments, and whatever else is on your mind.  And if you’d like feedback on a snippet of writing, head on over to Gae Polisner’s blog for Friday Feedback, where you can share a few paragraphs of your work and offer feedback to others, too.  And we also have a special guest post on the topic of world building today, from author Mike Jung. Check that out here.

And finally…I just have to share this. This week, I had a dream that everyone in Teachers Write (like a thousand of us!) took a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the assignment to write a poem in response to any piece of art we loved. (I was in line for-EVER buying special exhibit tickets for everyone, but after that it was great fun!) If you’re itching for a writing prompt today, why not try it? The Met’s collection is online here – choose something you love and let it inspire a poem if you’d like.

Happy writing! And happy weekend!  Remember to check in at Jen’s Teach Mentor Texts blog on Sunday, and  I’ll see you back here Monday morning!

Teachers Write welcomes debut author Mike Jung today for a guest post on world building. This will be especially useful to those of you working on fantasy & science fiction but applies to other kinds of writing, too. You may want to bookmark it for later if it doesn’t seem to fit what you’re doing right now.  Take it away, Mike!

Hello teachers! I’m thrilled to be here at Teachers Write, and I applaud you all for taking the plunge with us. My sixth grade teacher Miss Drake, would have been extremely pleased to see me involved with this terrific project.

Now, Kate herself is a far greater authority on worldbuilding than me – check out this blog post about her TED talk, for example – but I have a few thoughts on the matter, particularly as I’m currently working on two separate manuscripts that involve a fair amount of worldbuilding.

But perhaps you’re saying “hey pinhead, what the heck is worldbuilding?” Okay, here’s the Mike Jung definition: worldbuilding is the process of creating the setting that your story takes place in. If you’re a Tolkien fan like me, you may be recoiling in horror at the thought of creating thousands of years of history, a panoply of elfin and dwarvish peoples with their own cultures and characteristics, and a bunch of fake languages nobody can actually pronounce.  Create an entire world?? Are you crazy, Mike? Or maybe you like that idea, in which case, hey, go to town.

That’s not precisely what I’m talking about, though – I don’t think of “worldbuilding” solely as the creation of an entirely new world from the ground up, although that’s certainly one option. I think of it more as creating a setting with enough credibility to evoke a sense of reality in the reader, support the suspension of disbelief you’re asking of the reader, or both.

Here’s an example that’s also a thinly-veiled reference to my own book *cough cough* – Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities takes place in a small, contemporary city that’s fairly realistic, except for the fact that it has a resident superhero, Captain Stupendous, with the powers of flight, super-strength, invulnerability, and super-vision. In fact, there are over 50 superheroes scattered throughout the world, and they’re constantly defending the safety of their respective cities by battling one crazypants supervillain or another.

Nobody’s EVER going to mistake my book for a work of non-fiction, and clearly readers will have to willingly engage in some suspension of disbelief. So I didn’t try to create some plausible, scientifically-grounded explanation of how Captain Stupendous actually could fly in the real world. There’s enough pop-cultural precedent for that particular element of fantasy to make it easy to swallow.

One thing I did do, however, was try to establish some consistency and logic behind the way people in the world of Geeks think and react to the thyroidal spandex-clad weirdos in their midst. For example, I created a very broadly-sketched culture of superhero fandom throughout the country, a culture that’s represented by two specific Captain Stupendous fan clubs in my fictional city.

I also needed to create some settings that would fill the needs of my plot, and also the needs of my characters as real people, if that makes any sense. For example, there’s this pizza parlor which worked really well as the setting for my first chapter in terms of facilitating the plot, but it also fills a role in the characters’ lives outside of that chapter. Kids need public places to hang out, you know? Spud’s Pizza was my characters’ place to hang out long before the events of the book happened. And I didn’t want that because my story absolutely needed a pizza joint instead of, say, a boba tea house, an ice cream parlor, or a convenience store full of giant-size beverages and various conglomerations of processed butter and sugar – I wanted it because it helped make my characters into people who could be real.

A character’s thoughts, feelings, and actions may be driven by her pointy-eared people’s fifteen millennia of dragon-infested history, but they might also be driven by the history of her local town, which has always been driven by a particular multinational company that’s suddenly decided to shutter all its local facilities. A group of disenfranchised kids might end up mystically transported to a dimension that’s terrorized by giant, intelligent fish, or they might face challenges with the bully population at their school, but in either case the antagonistic characters will be products of their environment and history.

All of which is a rambling way of saying that on the surface, worldbuilding is about…well, building a world: creating a sense of place; conveying specific details; establishing continuity; and making things believable, all of which are hugely important, of course. But on a deeper level, I think worldbuilding is actually a vital way of showing the history behind our stories, and ultimately, the history of our individual characters. No matter how fantastical or everyday our settings are, their ultimate purpose is to illuminate the worlds inside the hearts and minds of our characters.

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Mike Jung has obviously read a whole lot of fantasy and science fiction. His debut novel Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities will be released on October 1, by Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. He lives in Northern California with his wife (who tolerates his weirdness), his kindergarten-age daughter (who can already debate him to a standstill), and his toddler-age son (who’s developed a suddent reckless streak). Learn more at his website and follow him on Twitter @MikeJung.

Hi, everybody! Some of you have been asking if it would make sense for you to form smaller groups within the Teachers Write community to give one another feedback in addition to what we’re already doing, and that’s a fine idea. So let’s talk about critique groups.

A critique group is a small group of people (usually 2-6) who write and agree to read one another’s work from time to time and provide feedback with the purpose of helping one another improve. Critique groups can happen in person — if you live close to some other writers, you might agree to meet once a month at the local coffee shop for this — or online, in which case you’d exchange pages of writing via email or set up a system with folders in Yahoo Groups or something similar.

They can be made up of people who are at about the same level (beginners, folks revising first novels, etc.), people who write the same genre (YA, MG, picture books, nonfiction, etc.) or people who write different kinds of work but have an appreciation for what the others write, too.

Sometimes, critique groups operate on a schedule (each week, writers take turns sending maybe five pages for critique by the others) and sometimes they’re more informal (people share work when it’s done or when they need feedback, and others critique as they can. This is more common with experienced writers, I think, who tend to have deadlines and less predictable schedules.)

Sometimes, it takes a while to find the right critique group. People sometimes post new critique groups or openings in established ones at the SCBWI site or on Verla Kay’s discussion boards for children’s writers. Sometimes, you express interest in this, and someone else has filled the spot already or seems to be a better fit for that particular group. Do not take this personally or read anything into it at all. It happens. It happened to me numerous times when I was looking for a critique group, and if it happens to you, it doesn’t mean that you’re not a good writer or a nice person or anything else. It only means that your “just-right” critique group is still out there.  And sometimes, people join a critique group and then realize it’s not a good fit, so they drift away. All of this is part of the process, and it’s okay.

I’ve been in a bunch of critique groups over the years, all full of great people and talented writers. Some have been better fits than others, especially my current group with writers Loree Griffin Burns, Eric Luper, and Liza Martz.  Though we write different genres, we all appreciate one another’s work.  We run into each other at conferences & retreats sometimes, but our group operates mostly online (via Yahoo groups) and we don’t have a set schedule.  I also have a couple other good writers friends with whom I swap manuscripts sometimes.

Last summer, I wrote a pretty detailed piece on how to critique a friend’s writing for the Stenhouse Summer Blogstitute. It uses one of my editor’s revision letters as a mentor text for how to critique someone’s writing in a way that’s constructive and rigorous without making that person feel sad or frustrated or so angry they want to shove their crummy manuscript up your nose.  You should read that here. Go ahead…and then come back. I’m going to get a cup of coffee while you do that….

So…do you think you might like to be in a critique group?  I can’t create one for you…or tell you who to have coffee with, but I can provide a place for you to talk with other like-minded people who feel the same way and might want to connect with you.  We’ll do that early next week. After that, you’ll be on your own to make arrangements with the people you meet on that post and figure things out.

Watch for that post on Monday, in addition to our regular Mini-Lesson Monday.  But today…I’d like to invite your questions about critique groups, and I’d like to invite authors to comment and share a little about how their critique groups work.  I think you’ll see that like writing styles, there are many critique group styles, and the “right” one is the one that works for you and your writing partners. A respectful, supportive tone is essential, but beyond that, you can figure out how to set things up.

Questions? Comments? Critique group models or tips to share? Fire away!

It’s time for Thursday’s Quick-Write.  Before we get to the prompt, let’s have a virtual round of applause for the authors who answered questions during Wednesday Q and A.  (Woo-hoo!!) If you’d take a few minutes to look up those authors who made time to answer your questions, that would be great – their responses will mean more if you learn about their books. And if those books sound like something your readers would enjoy, please consider adding them to your IndieBound wish-lists or GoodReads to-read lists.

Today’s Thursday Quick-Write is courtesy of guest author Pam Bachorz!  (Bio courtesy of Pam’s website & photo by Louis Torres)  Pam grew up in a small town in the Adirondack foothills, where she participated in every possible performance group and assiduously avoided any threat of athletic activity, unless it involved wearing sequined headpieces and treading water. With a little persuasion she will belt out tunes from “The Music Man” and “The Fantasticks”, but she knows better than to play cello in public anymore. Pam attended college in Boston and finally decided she was finished after earning four degrees: a BS in Journalism, a BA in Environmental Science, a Masters in Library Science and an MBA. Her mother is not happy that Pam’s degrees are stored under her bed.  Pam draws inspiration from the places she knows best: she wrote CANDOR while living in a Florida planned community, and set DROUGHT in the woods where she spent her summers as a child. She currently lives in the Washington, DC area with her husband and their son.

Ready to write?

Think of the place that is home for you. It might be where you live today, or perhaps where you grew up. Wherever you choose, be sure to pick a place that you know well. Take one minute to write down every detail about this place that you can think of.

Done with the first part? Now we’re going to twist it around. Take the rest of your time to write about three changes that would make this place utterly altered for you–changes that would mean it was no longer home.

What sort of changes? That’s entirely up to you. Perhaps you’ll change how home looks, or smells, or  where it’s located. Or maybe it’s the people there who make it home.

This prompt aims to help you draw rich details from familiar settings into your fiction, and to also see how they can be altered to be something entirely different for your stories. Think of it as taking a favorite pair of pants to the tailor and coming home with a pencil skirt!

Note from Kate: If you have a work-in-progress, you can also feel free to write this from your character’s point of view. It may teach you something about him or her that you didn’t know before.

Feel free to share a snippet (no more than a paragraph or two, please!) of what you wrote today in the comments if you’d like – and thanks for the support you’re giving one another by responding to those comments! You’re making this a really fun place to be a writer.

Got questions about writing?  Wednesday is Q and A Day at Teachers Write! Virtual Summer Writing Camp.  Authors are always welcome to drop by and answer questions (you never quite know who you’ll run into here!) But today’s official author volunteers are Mara Rockliff, Miriam Forster, and Erin Dealey. They’ve promised to be around to respond to your questions today, so please visit their websites & check out their books!

Teachers & librarians – Feel free to ask your questions in the comments.  Published author guests have volunteered to drop in and respond when they can.

Guest authors – Even if today isn’t a day you specifically signed up to help out, feel free to answer any questions you’d like to talk about.  Just reply directly to the comment.

On Tuesdays & Thursdays during Teachers Write! Virtual Summer Writing Camp, I’ll be sharing quick-write prompts, designed to get you free-writing for a few minutes in response to a question or idea. These can be used as a simple free-write, brainstorming, warm-up activity OR as a way to deepen your thinking about a work-in-progress.   Got your keyboard or pencil ready?

Today’s writing prompt is courtesy of guest author Jeannine Atkins, whose most recent book is Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C. J. Walker, Marie Curie and Their Daughters (Holt).  She teaches Children’s Literature at UMass-Amherst and a graduate course in writing for children at Simmons College. You can learn more on her website at http://www.Jeannineatkins.com

Advice from a writing teacher my freshman year in college has stuck with me all these years. She took a look at my labored prose and suggested I take a break to write some letters home describing life around me. My family was glad for some details, and I got the point that writing can be best when begun with a very particular audience in mind, rather than the vague judge I’d been used to writing papers for, backing up opinions and providing citations.

I suggest taking the main character of the piece you’re working on, or want to start, and write about her or him as if to your mom or a trusted friend. Or begin a poem or story as a letter to your main character, or if you’re already on your way, take a break to ask your character the sort of sincere, casual questions we often reserve for friends. These questions might include: Do you have a favorite place to be alone?  A favorite toy, piece of clothing, pet, tree, tool, or book?  Did someone encourage you to do what you love?  How? Did anyone try to stop you?  What did they do or say? What parts of your work are hard or boring?  What mistakes did you make?  What did you learn from them? Who or what do you love?

What starts as a letter may turn into more of a conversation, and if your character seems chatty, please, just let her speak, even when it seems off topic.

You might move into writing dialog between two characters. Or you can write a poem based on questions and responses, and edit out the questions if you want. Love That Dog by Sharon Creech is an excellent example of a narrative composed of a boy’s letters to his teacher, which makes it clear we don’t need her replies to get a sense of her character.

Thanks, Jeannine!

Lots of options for today’s quick-write. Ready? Get writing! And if you’d like, stop back later on to share a paragraph or two in comments.

Good morning!  Before we get to Mini-Lesson Monday, we have some winners to announce for our EYE OF THE STORM giveaway. Drum roll, please…

 …Cindy Hundley, Carol Ann Osler, Lisa Rosenman, Stacy Dillon, and Catherine Flynn!  Please email me (kmessner at kate messner dot com) with your name & mailing address, and Walker/Bloomsbury will send out your books. If you didn’t win (sorry!) but want to purchase EYE OF THE STORM, you can click here to order from your local independent bookstore.

In addition to our Monday Mini-Lesson, remember that author Jo Knowles offers a Monday Morning Warm-up on her blog to start each week, so be sure to visit her if you’d like another idea for free writing today.

Now for today’s topic…

Outlining: When, Why, & How…

  …with guest author Sally Wilkins.  Sally is a New Hampshire author and research lover who has written both nonfiction and early readers. Check out her books here.

We’ve probably also all heard that writers should create outlines for their work – even for their fiction! We know that we’re supposed to be able to state the theme and summarize the plot of our books in a single sentence. We’ve heard expressions such as “If you don’t have a map, you won’t know whether you’re headed toward your destination” or “without a recipe, you’re just throwing in the ingredients and hoping something edible emerges.”

 And most of us have probably felt the paralysis of trying to codify our freedom-loving creativity into that oh-so-structured outline format, and wondered, simultaneously, both “How?” and “Why?”

Some authors swear by their outlines, many others will flatly state that they don’t outline. By which they generally mean that they don’t do a Roman/Uppercase/Arabic outline of their book or article before they start writing. Scratch the surface of that declaration, and you’ll almost certainly discover some other way of planning and organizing their material – something that doesn’t look or feel like an outline, but works like one.

A writer’s outline may take the form of a calendar or a timeline. It may resemble a flowchart or, indeed, a road map (or a set of directions printed out from the internet). For a picture book, the storyboard is a very common form of outline. Most important, a writer’s outline is not a static document, created before the writer begins to write and followed, point by point until the end. A writer’s outline is a dynamic tool. In the end, the finished work will have internalized the structure of the outline, so that a student told to make an outline of the book (especially if it is non-fiction) will be able to do just that, distilling the contents into that old familiar format. But that’s the finished product!

So let’s go back to the beginning and see how the writer’s outline works.

Every piece begins with an idea. The idea may be a theme or a topic (assigned pieces often begin this way). It may be a character, an event or a landscape the writer wants to explore. The very first outlining that the writer does looks a lot like jotting down notes: capturing random thoughts as they occur, adding bits and pieces of information she already knows and reminders of pieces she’ll need to research or discover. The bits may include names and descriptions of characters, snatches of dialog, one-sentence summaries of important information (with references, we hope), even photographs torn from magazines. Sometimes this jotting is an intentional, structured effort (as it will be in a classroom). Often it happens over time, frequently while the writer is working on other things, resulting in a file folder full of notes scrawled on the backs of old drafts, assorted pieces of notebook paper and stationary, and yes, envelopes and napkins. When the writer is ready to begin the project, these random bits get grouped together – maybe by character, maybe in chronological order, maybe as stops along a journey. Although the groups may not be labeled with Roman numerals, they are, in fact, the headings of an outline. In a classroom setting, you could ask students to create that outline from the groups and bits and pieces of information – but you would need to make it clear that this is not a finished product, because it is very likely that there will be A’s without B’s and all kinds of other missing parts to these outlines. Give yourself that same instruction – this is a work-in-progress tool. Leave lots of blank space in each section, so you can include new material as it comes along.

This early outline not only helps you think about the structure of your writing, but highlights the places where the material is unbalanced. In a non-fiction piece, this will point out places where you need more research. In fiction, you’ll see gaps in your narrative, characters that need developing, plot breaks where you need to construct a transition. (An important observation for those who write picture books and short form pieces – the outline may in fact be longer than your manuscript!)

Timeline for a biography that was shorter than its outline!

This is the point where the “I never outline” and the “I must outline” writers generally diverge. You may choose to fill in those gaps right then, so that when you begin to write you do in fact know every episode in your plot or every concept in your article. Or you may trust the outline to remind you that you need to go back to them later, and begin writing with only that bare skeleton of an “outline” as a guide. (Many writers don’t look at it again until they complete the first draft.)

As you continue to accumulate material you’ll create another kind of outline (or your original skeleton will morph into one). Building the structure of the “chapter” outline goes along with the process of mapping your work in your mind. Will it move chronologically, geographically, or thematically? How will you transition from one section or chapter to the next? For this outline your headings may be possible opening sentences, bullets or titles. Under each heading you’ll note the scene, the characters, and the action you’ll be describing there. You’ll note what information you’ll be including, and may decide some things need to be introduced earlier or held until later to improve the flow or balance of the work. When you actually begin to write, you may find yourself writing the middle of the piece first, then the scene leading to the climax, circling around to fill in the blank places later. An outline allows you to do this: you don’t have to write the book or article in the order that your reader will read it.

Your outlining will continue as you begin to write – the outline and the manuscript will interact, each illuminating the other.

Always, the outline remains a tool, not a dictator. As you write, the work may turn in unexpected directions. New characters may show up and demand a part. A question from a critique group member may make you rethink your underlying assumptions. Write on! You can always go back and adjust the outline. Move the pieces around. Combine some, expand others, prune and remove parts that don’t work. Contrary to the oh-so-neat finished product, outlining is a messy business. (Some writers like to put each section on an index card or post-it note, so they can move them around more easily.)

When you have finished the first draft, do another outline – this one from the text. This outline will become a useful tool in your revisions, highlighting problem areas and enabling you to see the overall structure of your work. You can look more dispassionately at the outline/summary of each chapter and say “is there enough action here?” and “does this move the plot?” than you can when you’re reading the words you’ve lovingly set down on paper. With each successive draft, the outline will become tighter and cleaner. Eventually you will be able to label it “Chapter synopsis” and include it in your book proposal!

Assignment for this week:

If your project is at the idea stage, do a brain-dump, jotting down all the random bits and pieces. Begin to sort them into logical groups. Create a rough outline (or timeline, or map, or flow chart) from these groups.

If you already have a work in progress draft, create an outline from the text. Look for gaps and bulges in the outline. Think about (and jot down) how you can smooth and balance those problem areas in the next draft.

And a note from Kate…

If you don’t have one major project for the summer but you want to practice outlining and see how it all works, try creating an outline of one of your favorite books. When I was writing EYE OF THE STORM, I really wanted to make it fast-paced for kids who love action. Before I started writing my thriller, I sat down and studied the pacing in a book I admired for its pacing, THE HUNGER GAMES. I made a chapter-by-chapter outline and learned a lot about why we can’t put that book down. It’s a fun exercise!

And remember…outlines take all kinds of forms. Here’s another example from Sally, with story elements on a calendar.

And here’s a blog post I did on outlining/planning a while back called, “Real Authors Don’t Plan…Or do they? An open letter to Tyler.”  It shows all the different kinds of planning & outlining I did for my upcoming mystery, CAPTURE THE FLAG.

Outlines are kind of tricky to share in comments, but feel free to ask any questions you have in the comments for this post, or stop back and let us know how it goes!