One tiny step at a time I'm getting closer to my outline. It is frustrating. Perhaps the worst part of outlining is the pressure to get it done. As I told a fellow sound designer once, there's a point at which the effort of optimization becomes itself sub-optimal. You can procrastinate forever trying to find the perfect plan.
The trick is knowing when you stop. Another circle in the N-dimensional Venn Diagram that makes up the goals and structures of a story. The nasty thing about writing is that unlike, say, trying to work up a microphone plot and a speaker hang, there are vanishingly few beginning constraints. The theme, the plot, the style, the world; all are up for grabs.
Really, a big part of plotting and outlining is letting go of the paths not taken. The only progress is in how small you can shrink the circles, how many options you take off the table. That also makes it nearly impossible for anyone, even another writer, to help you with the process. It is difficult to explain whatever parameterization you may have already achieved on these wibbly-wobbly balls of character arc/narrative density/extended allusions/world building stuff. It is even harder to defend the reasoning behind any of these choices. So when the person who is trying to help says, "Why don't you just do this?" it would almost inevitably require rethinking a choice made many branches ago, and by re-making it cause changes to cascade across everything you'd hoped you had already nailed down.
I took a look at Scapple, a planning software from the same guys who make Scrivener. It is cute but too limited. It allows you to make text blocks or images that can be linked with lines in the honored photographs-and-bits-of-string model. Something which has been asked for in Scrivener but proves difficult to conceptualize how it could actually be integrated usefully.
For me it is insufficient. Scrivener at least allows me to create an index card where a brief description can be drilled into a full-length text or even a nested file structure. With split screen, you can even unpack a card or folder whilst still displaying the hierarchy above it.
Unfortunately you can't unpack two branches and compare material within them while still viewing their place in the overall file structure. Really, I think a lot of these schemes fail on the problem that the data of writing is generally text, and text is graphically inefficient, and it would be tough to find the monitor space to display anything but the most trivial layer of what is a deeply fractal data set.
Another way of viewing the data set is of multiple threads, or multiple slices. A physical progression, a mental evolution (say, solving a mystery), and a character arc may be happening simultaneously, but not all of these elements start, crest, or conclude at the same points. So one scene might contain bits from all three, or none at all.
The best I've seen from various software packages is keyword tracking. Some even have ways of linking to a live timeline, or a map, so the evolution over time or space is implicitly carried along these keyword links. Alas, this doesn't help all the other arcs you might want to track. Even tracking where you've dropped background information and world building the reader needs to know is a difficult task.
I think what might work for me is if I could hyperlink; if I created a folder containing discrete scene particles of each major moment in an arc, I could have those aliased from folders representing scenes or chapters while remaining editable in their original relationship.
So I've defined a lot of the top level of The Enceladus Calyx. The length, the time I'm willing to invest until First Draft, the general flavor, the subject area. Those are all things that can't be changed because they define the project itself. Next down are elements I have enough planning time invested in I'd really rather not change; the protagonist and a bunch of supporting cast, the bones of the plot, locations, several set-piece scenes.
As in my other novel (other other novel?) I'm trying very hard to do only general research until the outline is locked, at which point I can focus in on smaller more specific questions. Instead of having to learn everything there is about the Hess, I just have to reconstruct Bad Münster am Stein-Ehrenberg.
Given the above, everything revolves around the titular antiquity and that's been my struggle for the last couple of weeks. The places the calyx has been, who has seen it, who has held it, form the whodunnit part of the plot. What the characters, including my protagonist, know about the calyx and its journey and how they react forms the basis of the functional plot; this is what generates everything from dialogs to fight scenes. What the calyx says about definitions and ownership of antiquities and Antiquity forms the themes I am working. And of course it would be nice if it all fell within what is actually true in the current-day antiquities market.
So everything influences everything. It's a fuzzy logic problem that's grown into a giant hairball.
That gets me way more than is possible to explain in any terse fashion. It means that a key early scene can be framed more cleanly around the experience of my protagonist defining her relationship with the role she finds herself playing. It means that the scenes in Germany allow it to be, well, Germany; not a stand-in for issues in contemporary America. It means there is a lot more discovery to be had when she returns to Athens. It also gives the gallery something to legitimately display and sell.
It hasn't solved the problem that I've shoved too much action into the front end and I'm still looking at a sagging middle. But still...it has moved me one step closer to being able to wrestle with commas, instead of with abstractions and labels attempting to stand in for tens of thousands of words of text.
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