OnlineBookClub.org

Starting my 4th novel and having lots of false starts, fits and spurts, dead ends, all sorts of misadventures.

So I'm wondering how you start a new book (or short story or whatever fiction). Do you outline in a detailed manner? Do you have multiple plot threads buzzing around in your head? Or do you seem to get rolling pretty easily?

Here's my startup story and what I did to get things going -- I'm starting my 4th in the "Mitch King" series of modern American private detective novels. So...

I first started several overall story lines, each of which I could take as the principal thread to pursue:
1. A priest is being blackmailed. He's gay and in the closet and another priest asks Mitch for help.
2. Mitch's good friend has been killed in a traffic accident. But it soon becomes a murder investigation.
3. Mitch's college roommate is now a professor and is receiving death threats.
4. Mitch is helping security at a big computer conference and gets involved in a feud between two former business partners, now enemies. Then one of them is murdered and the other is the principal suspect.
5. A friend of Mitch is of Vietnamese ethnicity. There are murders being committed among Vietnamese and Mitch is asked to help.

I started all these 5 possible main plots and wrote 3-4 chapters of along these various plot lines, tossed my mind back and forth. I spent most of a month on these things and couldn't decide. All seemed okay stories.

Now at no time did I outline or even decide "who did it" except that I had general story lines to work from. Should I do more outlining? Would a more formal outline help? Do you outline?

So... After some jostling and messing around. I decided that plot #2 is the one I will start on, and I'll save the other possibles for later. I also "borrowed" a little of story #5 to blend with #2, making it a subplot.

Next I started Chapter 1 with a little whimsical story about Mitch and his Vietnamese pal heading out to meet someone, and a few chapters later, bringing in the main story about the friend's death.

I worked on this a while and changed my mind once more. I put the death of the friend as Chapter 1, starting off in a dark and somber tone. Then the secondary story line comes later.

Right now, this seems the better choice but hey, I may change my mind again. I'm allowed!

What is the procedure you follow when starting a new book? Do you outline and find them helpful, or do you find outlines too restrictive? Do you just start writing and go back later and fix it? Or do you plan more carefully and write quite precisely from the start?

What sort of tricks and helps do you find you can use that allow you to proceed nicely with your new novel?

Your list of ideas sound like a whole series of books! Good job! I have never been able to do an outline with any success. I usually take my idea, put it in the middle of a piece of paper and do a bubble chart out from that. You can really go wild with it and you don't have to be organized at all. From that chart, which is always a work in progress, you can either make an outline or write straight from the bubbles.

Thanks! And all of these ideas listed are prospective books in my "Mitch King" mystery series. I've got several possible book "starts" in my mind and of course in brief summaries saved in my "ideas" folder.

I toyed with the professor angle a while and realized that with my 3rd novel being publicized fairly strongly by my new publisher later this fall when it comes out (the first 2 will also be published earlier in the fall), new readers will hopefully be interested in the upcoming 4th novel, and if they want to read the 4th book, they'll likely also want more of the Houston-based story. To change the venue for new readers and put the 4th story into Austin Tx instead, might be more of a switch than they want. So I elected to keep my book's locale in Houston. Or so I reasoned. So here's the first para from the new novel:

"Death never comes as a guest. It’s always an intruder into our lives, even for the aged and infirm. But when that dark and final veil arrives unexpectedly, with no time for the least preparation, the impact is even worse. And this time, death once more had descended upon a close friend and was delivered to us with violence."

Naturally, all these other ideas are saved and are set up for the 5th and 6th and so on novel in the series.

Anyway... I've tried all sorts of tricks and such to get started on a story -- outlining in the conventional means, an ideas sheet similar to your bubble chart, and so on. None of them work for me. I just sit there and get more involved into the tricks of the gimmick rather than to be launched into the writing itself. And so, for me, I just start "Chapter 1" and plunk down text. The very act of writing gets me off and running a lot more successfully than any sort of artificial "how to write" trick, such as the "snowflake" method.

I've also totally weaned myself from any sort of notebook or journal or other handwritten methods. Everything goes straight from the brain into MS-Word and is saved. Even random ideas are not scribbled on some physical notepad -- I've got a very good memory and so all of these flashes of creativity (or non-creativity, ha ha) go on my trusty HP laptop and are saved in an "ideas" folder. I'll also save funny ideas and funny memories from my past, as well as non-funny stuff, words I hear or modern new phrases to insert into the narrative or conversations. Last novel I had a young guy approve of something, "It's deck" and he also said "Think you're all five for that?" which I frankly have zero idea what "all five" means but it sounded good, like 100% so I had this young guy say it. Anyway...

Whatever writing method works for you, go for it. If the bubble chart is helpful, by all means use it. In other words, I'm all five for it. ha ha

HA! Yes, it's all five for me! The chart just keeps me somewhat organized. I am one of those right-brained creative types that have a hard time remembering my ideas so I HAVE to have something to keep me headed in the right direction. Sounds to me like you've got it licked! I'm starting my 2nd novel now and haven't bubbled yet, but have done some research. I like your 1st paragraph! Very intriguing. Houston is such a big place you would never run out of settings for your hero! I lived there for 15 years.

I spent most of my "day job" career in high tech venues, first polymer chemistry research, then scientific / engineering programming, software & hardware support management, and tech documentation consultant for Big Oil. So I understand the organization thing totally.

And my extensive science & engineering education and work experience helps not only with better organization of my stories but also I've got occasional tech info to insert to flesh out the books. Likewise my penchant for Shakespeare, and my longtime study of history, biography, and science in general. All of these help.

What I do however is keep it all in notation "helper" files in my "ideas" folder and I can go back and retrieve various nubbins of junk to stuff my stories with, ha ha. I meant to say "gems of genius which I can thread through my glorious detective novels" of course.

Definitely "gems of genius"! When I do my research, I keep a working file as well and simply go back and forth between the story and the information. The bubble chart just helps me remember what I want to write about. I suppose I could do it on the computer, but I keep it on the wall in front of me as inspiration.

I've got a folder "bloodbetrayal" (the tentative name of my new book in progress). In that folder I've got several short chapter starts, then an "betrayal info" file, and my principal "Blood Betrayal" file into which I type my text.

If I find a section that I might want to keep but I'm not sure about, I copy or transfer it to a separate file such as "ch1-alt" or "ch3-alt", and I can sometimes go back and excerpt portions of those files and put them into the main text as I think needed.

I find that I write best if I go back a chapter or two before I start writing a new chapter. For example, if I'm starting ch6 I'll go to ch4 and ch5 and re-read them. I often make a few changes there, too, find an overuse of maybe a certain word or places where I want to vary the sentence structure to adjust the rhythm. Then I go forward with chapter 6 and 7. I'm always going back thru earlier chapters, however, to ensure I keep the story line intact. Typical stuff.

Where you may have a bubble chart, I have my "ideas" file to refer to. Works the same. And for inspiration? I think about my new 3rd novel and dream about it becoming a best seller. Ha!