Collected Essays Read Online Free PDF Page B

consciously used the monomyth to plot the chapters of Frek and the Elixir , I had to work as hard as ever to figure out the details. There’s no substitute for simulation.
    As I keep saying, a characteristic feature of any complex process is that you can’t look at what’s going on today and immediately deduce what will be happening in a few weeks. It’s necessary to have the world run step-by-step through the intervening ticks of time. Gnarly processes are unpredictable; they don’t allow for short-cuts.
    Let me say a bit about plots and outlining. I used to maintain that it was better not to plot my novels in advance. But maybe I was just making a virtue of a vice. I denigrated plot outlines because I didn’t like working on them, preferring to jump right into the writing.
    One might defend the practice of not having a precise outline by speaking in terms of the gnarl. To wit, a characteristic feature of any complex process is that you can’t look at what’s going on today and immediately deduce what will be happening in a few weeks. It’s necessary to have the world run step-by-step through the intervening ticks of time. Gnarly computations are unpredictable; they don’t allow for short-cuts. In other words, the last chapter of a novel with a gnarly plot is, even in principle, unpredictable from the contents of the first chapter. You have to write the whole novel in order to discover what happens in the last chapter.
    This said, I’ve also learned that if I start writing a novel with no plot outline at all, two things happen. First of all, the readers can tell. Some will be charmed by the spontaneity, but some will complain that the book feels improvised, like a shaggy-dog story. Second, if I’m working without a plot outline, I’m going to experience some really painful and anxious days when everything seems broken, and I have no idea how to proceed. I’ve heard Sheckley refer to these periods in the compositional process as “black points.” Writing an outline makes it easier on me. Perhaps it’s a matter of mature craftsmanship versus youthful passion.
    These days, even before I start writing a new book, I create an accompanying notes document in which I accumulate outlines, scene sketches and the like. These documents end up being very nearly as long as my books, and when the book comes out, I usually post the corresponding notes document online for perusal by those few who are very particularly interested in that book or in my working methods. (Links to these notes documents and some of my essays can be found on my writing page .)
    Even with an outline, I can’t be quite sure about the twists and turns my story will take. How precise, after all, is an outline? William Burroughs used to say a novel is a map of a territory. But an outline is only a map of a map.
    In the end, only the novel itself is the perfect outline of the novel. Only the territory itself can be the perfect map. In this connection, I think of Jorge Luis Borges’s one-paragraph fiction, “On Exactitude in Science,” that contains this sentence: “In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.”
    Regarding the outline, I think of a novel’s structure as breaking into four increasingly fine levels: parts, chapters, scenes, and actions. I start with a story arc, describing how the parts fit together. I break the parts into chapters and outline the chapters one by one. As I work on a chapter’s outline, I break it into scenes, trying to outline the individual scenes themselves. But as for the actions that make up a scene, more often than not I simply visualize these and describe what I “see.”
    The outline changes as I work. Shit happens. After writing each scene in a given chapter, I find that I have to go back and revise the outlines of the remaining scenes of the chapter. And after