Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Expanding a manuscript, operationally

As facilitator of the Exploratory Writing Workshop I get the full range of talent and experience in my class. What they all have in common is a desire to become better writers, but as you can imagine their writing is all over the board when it comes to quality.

I see my job not as a nitpicker but rather a coach. In coaching I find the three things I like best about their work and three areas which could be most improved. My review follows a checklist from the lesson requirement and then "attaboys" for the high three and "aweshucks" for the low three.

I've noted over time, that my students tend to show two distinct modus opperendi's. Some are "Pantzers" and some "Structuralists."

In my early develop I was taught the importance of outlines. The problem I had was the difficulty outlining something that had yet to flash in my mind.

I took instead the fine art painter's approach. I did some written sketches of a scene and then worked the scenes into chapters and the chapters into a final composition. The result was I'd write a series of vignettes and let them tell me the story. After writing six to twelve of these I felt better about taking on an outline.

I feel that an outline is not something negotiable. If an author wants to wind up with a coherent and integrated novel, it is imperative.

About half my students find, after writing their vignettes, don't finish the last two lessons which deal with outlines.

There are some, I suppose, who are gifted with a high powered intellect and don't need an outline. In my lifetime I have seen people who could get by without them.

Having said that, the biological CPU most writers are born with, runs out of random access memory once it gets beyond the scope of a short story.

A short story is about a 5K chapter worth of words. A writer can push the pencil or pound the keys and achieve something on this scale. Beyond this level, however, the capacity of the human brain becomes saturated and all kinds of important considerations begin falling through the cracks.

The more I use an outline to capture sketches and integrate my writing, the more I like them.

They allows me to write in bite sized chunks rather than juggling an undoable number of balls in the air at the same time.

Further, the outline holds the balls in place while I expand the scenes in a chapter, taking the germ of an idea and expanding it to fullest potential.

I call the outline part of a novel the "operational" part.

In the military there are three levels of war. The tactical, operational and strategic.

The tactical level is local battle, something at a chapter level. Operational, is writing at the regional or multi-chapter level. The Strategic looks at the manuscript from a worldly point of view. If you follow me to this point, you get it. If you haven't, then what's the point of saying more.