Meredith Mansfield, Author

I’ve already confessed that I’m a discovery writer in an earlier blog post. But I don’t tackle a novel completely off the cuff. I might do a short story that way–take a concept and see where it goes. But not a novel. There’s just too much more room to run off into the weeds. Still, I have to give myself room to discover and explore because my best ideas seem to come to me while I’m actually writing. Something about keeping the juices flowing, I think.

I don’t do a classic outline, but I have tried to make what I call a proto-synopsis. But what do I put in this document? Well, more or less, the high points of the story:

• The main conflict. (I always insist on knowing this, since it’s what makes the story hold together as a unit, but it may not actually be written in that proto-synopsis.)
• The inciting incident. That’s obvious, of course. How can I start the story if I don’t have at least an idea where it starts?
• The first try/fail cycle. What’s my protagonists first, and horribly insufficient, attempt to solve his problem or achieve his goals?
• The second try/fail cycle. (This is one I’m sometimes still a little fuzzy on, even when I start writing.)
• The climax. I pretty much always know how the conflict will be resolved when I start. It may even be one of the first scenes I jot down.
• I don’t actually worry about the denouement at this stage. That’s one I pretty much always allow myself to discover out of the characters and what they’ve been through. I’ve been surprised by it a time or two, but that just makes it more fun to get there and find out.

Right now, I’m in the process of re-thinking this just a little. Using a proto-synopsis I think is not actually helping me as much as I hoped in writing a final synopsis. In particular, in hitting the parts of the story, I may not be giving enough emphasis to that central conflict. Something I need to consider carefully.