A Great Outlining Method
Some writers are fans of outlines. Others aren’t. Hence the age-old dichotomy of pantsers and plotters. When I write journalistic work, I tend to use an outline because nonfiction lends itself to “easier” organization. When I write fiction, my brain just doesn’t want an outline crowding it in. That’s when I prefer to make it up as I go along. Turns out, there’s a way to have your cake and eat it too. That’s the subject of my post today at SleuthSayers, the mystery blog.
When Denise and I first started writing books together, we happened upon a book called Writing for Story, by Jon Franklin, a journalist-turned-prof. (Affiliate link.) It’s one of those books I had heard about for years but never fully investigated. In it, Franklin showed how a journalist could map out a story in advance and never encounter the problem of trying to figure out how to make it all work. That’s a problem that happens to journalists who do a ton of research and then try to cram everything they’ve discovered into the story.
What’s this got to do with fiction?
I’m getting to that. Denise used the Franklin method with her first big nonfiction book and it worked really well. Whenever she got stuck, we would hash out next steps using Franklin’s book as our guide. To this day, I think Franklin’s method was the secret of her success with that book, propelling it to the New York Times bestseller list.
As I started writing more fiction, I wondered if I could use Franklin’s method but I never quite got it to work. Turns out, I didn’t really try.
One day, I happened upon a blog post by mystery writer Les Edgerton. Les loved Franklin’s book, and used it to plot many of his stories. In fact, in the blog he showed how he could scale a short story (written with Franklin’s method) into a novel. It was amazing, and I wrote to Edgerton.
There the story shifts into something lovely, sweet, and sad. But that’s all I’m going to say. If you’re a writer and looking to figure out how to outline well, or if you’re curious how the worlds of fiction and nonfiction have historically helped each other thrive, you ought to take a look at my post, which is entitled:
The Franklin-Edgerton Outlining Method Revealed!
Here’s part of what I’m saying over at SleuthSayers today:
My college years were solidly in the 1980s, which meant that some of my writing professors were products of the era of New Journalism, which was born in the 1960s and epitomized by the nonfiction work of such writers as Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Jimmy Breslin, and countless others.
The first rule of New Journalism is that great nonfiction can and should borrow its techniques from great works of fiction. Because newspaper and magazine stories are short, the ideal model for a nonfiction article is the fictional short story.
Why? A great short story has a beginning, middle, and an end. A great short story gives us characters that we care about. It’s dramatic, romantic, exciting, suspenseful—depending on dictates of its genre. And regardless of genre, great stories suck you in and keep you reading. If journalists could do all that in the pages of a daily newspaper or a magazine, well, wow, they would really be onto something.
I hope you’ll go check out the post. It’s one I’ve been meaning to share it for a long time.
Thanks for stopping by! In my article, I mention one of Edgerton’s caper novels. Definitely go check out that link. And while you’re here, I hope you’ll check out some of my thrillers.
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