The more I reflect on it, the more I view composing stories as a kind of extremely involved sudoku puzzle. Largely the similarity comes down to the interplay of local and nonlocal constraints — in sudoku, you’re concerned with the numbers in one square, while numbers from the other side of the board will place complex constraints on what the number can actually be.
Let’s torture this metaphor. If writing is taking a blank page and filling it in till it’s a valid sudoku, then how might we express that common dichotomy among writers — those who plan and outline, and those who improvise?
Outlining might be like placing number here and there, jumping around the board and deducing only what must be true due to constraints, or perhaps it’s that common tactic of jotting down possible numbers in the margins before to committing one. Or, more abstractly, perhaps we might say it’s deciding the rules of the sudoku variant first.
Improvising, instead, might be likened to going row by row, generating the next one with reference to what you’ve already put down, adhering to the emergent rules and constraints. Making up one number is easy, but it gets harder from there.
I don’t know if that any of that fits, but improvisers and outliners are ultimately producing the same thing in different orders. There’s no hard line to draw. Revision, obviously, would be the careful checking of the sudoku afterward, making sure the rules are held to.
This isn’t a great analogy — the very framing here is to suggest outlining is the sensible way to go about it. Perhaps that’s just a consequence of what prompted this, the strenuous amount of planning I’m currently doing for an upcoming project. If I’m already knee deep in outlining, reaching for sudoku metaphor can be excused.
The rules of sudoku are simple, but surely the rules of writing are much more complicated? Complicated to execute, definitely, but to describe? I think I could do it in a sentence. Writing — all writing, really, not just fiction — centers on setup and payoff, question and answer, tension and release. All the rest is corollary.
That sudoku-like sensation of planning out a story, then, is the endeavor of ensuring that that all needed build-up happens before every punchline — recursively, iteratively, across multiple interleaven and interlocking threads.
But what does it mean to set something up, or to pay it off? If I had to explain that, I think I’d first break it down into its necessary components. First you must present the elements, then juxtapose those elements in a suggestive way, then generate extrapolatory elements in a fitting way. Presentation, juxtaposition, generation. That’s two steps of setup and one step of payoff. Together, these constitute what I call the ur-development.
It may strike you that I’ve said not much at all here. Can’t anything be couched into the form these three very general ideas? I present myself to my front door, juxtapose my key in the lock, and generate an entrance. I’m being silly, but the question sticks with me. Is a man walking up to a door, unlocking with the key and stepping inside a story? Is everything a story? I think it’s fair to call it a development of a sort regardless, and beyond than that, I do think it’s fair to have a neutral definition — something being a development, or being a story, doesn’t mean it’s a good story. Boring stories exist.
Still, you might take issue with the tautology of the ur-development. Indeed, I’m reminded of a certain mindless truism that always annoyed me, and I heard it repeated so many times in English classes. “A story has a beginning, middle, and end.” And so does absolutely everything with any length at all, Ms. Gibbs.
But, though both are trivial deductions implied by our starting point, I think there’s an important difference. Consider two divisions of the day. The first divides each day into ‘hours before 3:53’ and ‘hours after 3:53’. Obviously, all of these hours must exist in the day, and all hours are one or the other and so the categorization is exhaustive and necessary.
On the other hand, consider the division into ‘hours between sunrise and sunset’ and ‘hours between sunset and sunrise’. Again, this must contain all the time in a day. But there’s something more natural about it, isn’t there? It, to use a common metaphor that alone might have obviated this whole passage, carves nature closer to the joints.
The first word of a story must be part of its beginning, and the last word must be part of its end. Somewhere between those two points, it goes from being ‘the beginning’ to being ‘the middle’, and then again to being ‘the end’. Where? Why there and not here? You can give good answers to these questions, but the labels themselves inspire no real understanding.
Some have argued that ‘beginning’ doesn’t mean the beginning — if you write a play and chop off act 2, you now have a story without a beginning; and the very phenomena of in media res necessitates the existence of a story without a beginning.
For the first objection, remember we’re looking for a definition of ‘story’, not ‘good story’ — a beginning being malformed does not make it not a beginning. The back half of a book may not have a proper beginning, but standing alone, the first appearance of characters and events are recontextualized as of the beginning (a role they ill-serve, of course).
For the second objection, it’s a confusion of the commonly co-occurring; the beginning of the story and the beginning of the story told are not the same; if characters in a story sat down and watched a play (which the text transcribes), that play would have its own beginning independent of the wider story — and when a tale begins in media res, it implies the existence of a greater story of which this is only the middle.)
Effectively, everything has a beginning, middle and end. Likewise, the elements of a story must first appear, and there must be contrasts among them, and there must be connections between them. But there’s something that feels almost tutorial-like about this description. It’s step by step. Present, juxtapose, generate.
Acts and Circles
Besides the dim triteness of “beginning, middle and end”, there are other story structures out there. “Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, then dénouement” is almost as dull, and I’ve never found it inspiring.
It’s a bit better when framed as “Inciting incident, progressive complications, crisis, climax, resolution”. But when you look into this, it’s often presented as the anatomy of something broader: the three act structure.
It doesn’t take much squinting to glance between the three act structure and the ur-development and see the same picture. The first act is literally called ‘setup’ in most models. Specifically, setup, then confrontation, then resolution. And what is a confrontation but a exciting way to juxtapose? What is resolution but a conclusive generation?
Okay, that’s a bit more tenuous, but believe me the vibes are there. Really, ‘resolve’ is a better word for that step anyway. (Why not use it? Mainly, I didn’t want my model to feel like it was hiding or smuggling meaning through its terminology. Say ‘generate some elements’, and that feels simple, easy to do. Say ‘resolve these elements’, and it’s daunting — what is resolution, really? It feels like being asked to draw the rest of the owl.)
Now, a lot of the important things we care about in a story happen in those middle bits, so the second act tends to be so heavy and load-bearing that it strikes many as fitting to split it into two acts. It’s harder to find a common terminology for this, as it’s a more idiosyncratic thing to do.
I don’t feel super inclined to relate my model to the four act structure, mainly because the four act structure is mostly an embellishment of the three act structure. I’ve never liked acts in general, truth be told — they don’t click for me.
Stillf, the four act structure is a convenient stepping point to the first model I consider truly good, an insightful masterstroke of simplification. This is Dan Harmon’s 8-step story circle.
It bills itself as a stripped down, all excesses excluded version of the hero’s journey, and that connection is going to be my justification for never mentioning the hero’s journey again in this essay.
I’ve spent a long time thinking about the story circle, mapping its symmetries, renaming its steps. I hope that intense familiarity doesn’t leave me assumptive in my description of it.
It’s easy to describe, honestly. We have a character, our protagonist, but they want something. So they go out to get it. But they must search for it. They find it, and take it, and return, but along the way, they have changed.
It’s a circle because with this change, we kind of have a new character, at least in a heraclitian sense. Perhaps they want something new? And then you have a new story to tell.
I have my problems with this, improvements I’d propose, but for once they are born out of appreciation rather than frustration. Mostly, I think Harmon chose the wrong names for his steps. It carves things at the joints, but clumsily wastes some meat in the process, if that mangled metaphor, no pun intended, makes sense.
The key to fixing it lies in hearing a certain aborted rhythm with the ’and’s and the ’but’s, and then restoring it. We have a character, but they want, and so they go, but they search, and so they find, but they take, and so they return, but they’ve changed, and so we have a character.
“But they take”? That doesn’t flow. It’s been years since I’ve thought through this track, but I believe the key insight to repairing this was found in a book by Dwight Swain, Techniques of the Selling Writer. I don’t recall his wording, but he held that at the climax, when the character is on the cusp of getting what they want, they have to make a choice, and what they want comes at a cost, or with a catch.
Another idea I wanted to work into my syncretism was — did I see it first in The Anatomy of Story? Don’t know, but truth told, it’s all over the place — the idea that stories (should?) involve some disconnect between what a character needs and want they want.
Anyway, I believe my version of the story circle went something like: a character needs something, but they want something else, so they decide to pursue that, but they must struggle, so they adapt and overcome, but they must pay the price, so they choose their path, but they’re changed. Something like that.
It’s the same shape, but I find it provides helpful clarity on the true function of the 6th and 7th steps. This does ditch the journey metaphor that Harmon was going for, but I think I came up with my own metaphor later:
There is a game. You want the prize. So you play. But you must learn the rules. So you come up with a strategy. But it has risks. So you win or lose, and you claim your reward.
There’s a few other features hidden in the Harmon model I want to illustrate. One is the cross-symmetry visible if you divide the circle into halves either horizontally or vertically. The horizontal line divides the character’s normal world and the underworld (or sometimes, the adventure world).
Other models make a big deal of this, but it never sang to me. The vertical line divides the old character from the new character, the former typically a passive or flawed approach to a problem portrayed in steps 1-4, and a active or improved approach portrayed in steps 5-8. There’s some inversion to the steps; Harmon’s “go” is opposite “return”; “search” opposes “take”; “want” opposes “change”. The symmetry isn’t gone in my versions, though it is less visible.
The last topic I’ll cover about entails bringing up yet another story model, the Kishōtenketsu. This one is a japanese model of a story in four acts. It’s translated as “Introduction, development, twist, conclusion.”
I’ve also spent some time smitten with this model, for reasons I’ll touch on elsewhere, but for now, if you squint a little, you might see something I found oddly fascinating. At the time, I thought that with a little poking, the story circle looks a bit like two kishotenketsu placed back to back.
I’m not sure if I still see it, but it does feel emblematic of the sort of wheels-with-wheels I kept running into the more I thought about and analyzed plot theories.
The Problematic Six
We’ve gotten quite far afield of the ur-development, that universal model of stepup and payoff, haven’t we? To tie us back, allow me to juxtapose one more thing. Because the key piece that lead to me cracking story structure wide open was not a story structure at all, but a diagnostic tool.
An editor on a certain fanfiction site made a habit of helping people with their stories, and one set of questions they’d have authors answer if they were stuck went something like:
- What is the problem the characters face?
- Why are they unable to solve it at the beginning of the story?
- Why are they able to solve it at the end of the story?
- How do they solve it?
I don’t even recall if those were the exact questions, but that quartet has been bouncing around in my head a lot lately. To understand, an anecdote. Recently, I’ve been writing a new story, (though I hadn’t published it when this article was first written).
At the beginning of the year, I had a lot of big ideas for it to be this fantasy epic, but months later, I’d made little progress in actually writing it, so I gave up.
Still, the ideas were pretty cool, and my friends like my ideas, so I figured I could summarize what the story would have been, there’d be something for them to enjoy from that. I didn’t have to write good descriptions, didn’t have to carefully show instead of tell, I just had to say what happens and why. It was supposed to be a loose outline.
What happened? It’s now 50k words long, and I’ve covered two arcs. Much as I touched in in my essay on the subject, detail is infectious. I suppose I have become so used to writing normally, had just enough specific ideas, that a complete description of them looks a whole lot like a normal novel.
Or, as a friend pointed out, a term is ‘lean draft’. Point is, this experience gave me the firm belief that telling a story is as simple as trying to give a rigorous explanation of what happens and why. If you really know what you’re talking about, if it’s really something interesting, you can’t really summarize it.
What does this have to do with the questions? Well, they looked simple enough, don’t they? I was convinced, if I could just write out answers to all four, I’d have story, simple as.
As I spent weeks mulling it over, the questions mutated, refined themselves, and I now had six I felt covered everything you need. Call ’em the problematic six.
- What is the problem?
- Whom does it affect?
- Why should they resolve it?
- When can they resolve it?
- How does their resolution play out?
- Where does that leave them?
Read between the lines, and suddenly we’re right back at the ur-development. 1–2 serve to present two elements, the problem and its solver. 3–4 serve to juxtapose them, expounding the solver’s motivation and means for solving, while exposing the problem’s need for and vulnerability to a solution. 5–6 serve to resolve them, extrapolating the effects of the solver on the problem, the problem on the solver.
This is all very neat, but I wanted more. How could I work my beloved story circle into this? At first blush, they seem to be twisted mirrors of each other. The problematic six focus on the antagonistic force, and story circle focuses on the protagonist.
But there’s a deeper equivalence. To get to that, we first need to engage in an impulse that affects so many plot theorists: recursion.
A lot of writers I’ve seen tend to look at very general models like the four-act structure or the story circle, and their eyes go wide, and they start to wonder how perfectly structured a story could be if you nested these structures inside of each other.
Every act having its own mini four act structure play out within, every point on the story circle have its own circle like Ptolemy’s epicycles… Our stories could be perfect little snowflakes. There’s a fallacy to this, and I’ll talk about it later.
Back to the problematic six. Despite my earlier breakdown, we might also notice a different structure to it: it overall has binary tenor of setup and payoff , with 1–3 introducing the problem, and 4–6 resolving it. This leaves each half with three elements — certainly a suggestive number.
Indeed, we present a problem, juxtapose it with its effects, relate that to an impetus to resolve it. We present a way to resolve it, juxtapose it with the effects of resolving it, and relate that to a conclusion.
Parsing it like this, I’m sure you feel the call of recursive mind worms, and want a complete ur-development so above as it is below.
The Metadevelopment Cycle
Enough setup. We now arrive at the grand structure-of-structures I call the metadevelopment.
- Create tension by presenting a perspective, juxtaposing it with an instability, thus generating a catalyst.
- Develop tension by presenting limitations, juxtaposing them with possibilities, thus generating a selection.
- Resolve tension by presenting consequences, juxtaposing them with adaptations, thus generating a conclusion.
My choice of names might furrow some brows, and it certainly bundles up a lot of meaning. The perspective is what others call the viewpoint character or the protagonist. There need not be an actual protagonist (see the example I often cite of a story without characters or plot). But all writing has a perspective; all writing is about something.
Within this perspective, we will see some instability. This is some contradiction or mystery or yes, conflict. Its presence is ripe with implications, makes us expect things to happen through it, or for the perspective to address it somehow. This is, conventionally, the antagonist, the dramatic question of the whole piece.
Some chemical reactions happen too slow for our purposes, and another chemical, when added, speeds it up. The instability would have probably resolved on its own, eventually, but the catalyst makes it happen faster. This is the inciting incident, the reason why the instability must resolve now instead of later, the motivation that drives a character to act.
There are reasons the instability exist, reason why, despite wanting to, the perspective can’t simply resolve it, even given the catalyst. That is, there are limitations to how this plot can progress. This is the road of challenges, the obstacles, difficulties, and antagonism the perspective encounters that complicate the resolution of the instability.
But, despite those limitations, there are possibilities for addressing the instability. The perspective finally adapts to the challenges, or finds the weakness that might be enough to let them win. Not every possibility will pan out, and the limitations will still constrain their options.
The perspective must navigate between them and make a selection. This is the climatic choice, of committing to the plan, or deciding what’s most important. It’s the final battle, if selecting a victor is what must be done.
Whatever the selection is, it will have consequences. This is the cost of victory, the catch, the tradeoff. It’s the unforeseen side-effects, the result of the refused possibilities, the limitations biting.
The selection, and the consequences, will result in adaptations (or perhaps, transformations). This is the evolution of the character and their relationships, this is the reward for a battle won and a day saved. It’s falling action. It’s where you might put the bookends to contrast who a character was and now is.
Which, all told, brings us to the conclusion wherein all the central developments of the story reach their equilibrium state, the loose ends tied up and the tangled knots untied. It may not have been the story of how a problem was truly solved (perhaps it was a tragedy, or one iteration in a long saga), but it is the tale of how one approach to solving the problem played out.
And if you’ve plotted all that… it certainly feels like you’ve told a story, doesn’t it?
Conflict versus Contrast
Now, I didn’t just choose the names I did to be different; my choice of names relates to one of my guiding principles in creating my models. Something unmentioned until now, but quite ubiquitous in the writer advice ecosystem, is the idea that stories must have conflict, that conflict defines stories. It comes baked into the framing of most plot theories. Perhaps the only model I’ve seen buck this trend is kishōtenketsu, which I first encountered as an example of how to structure plot without conflict.
I’m very partial to the open-minded notion that a story doesn’t have to have conflict, just as in other mediums, I’m very impressed by exploring boundaries. I’m wired for novelty-seeking, and the deification of conflict, to me, has the ring of being too constraining.
I’m sure conflict theorists will look at attempts to write stories without conflict, and still find conflict. It doesn’t have to be literal conflict, I’ve often been told.
A story can be about subtle clashes between characters, whose motivations and actions “conflict” indirectly. Or perhaps you could say two contrasting elements conflict with the audience’s expectations.
And if you did write a story truly devoid of conflict, would that absence of conflict not itself be a conflict with creative writing teachers?
As I explained earlier, a conceptual scheme can account for everything, and still fail compared to one that carves the whole closer to the joints. You can define ‘conflict’ so that ‘stories are about conflict!’ is true. But the framing affects how we think.
When we think about ‘conflict’, violence and enmity is what comes to mind. You could define music as the pursuit of consonance. After all, dissonance as always been subjectively defined, and in different styles, what constitutes consonance can vary. But there’s still a valid objection that this framing rubs against styles that define themselves by pursuit of dissonance. Do slice of life stories have conflict?
Having spent so long railing against a popular definition of story, I suppose I have a certain duty to provide a better one. Having now introduced all my terminology, it will finally make sense:
- Storytelling is the fruitful juxtaposition of dramatic and sensual detail.
- Story is a unified, resolved experience of repeated storytelling.
I find these definitions quite elegant, and for all their simplicity, a lot of thought went into picking each word. In effect, this definition lays out multiple axes of story and storytelling, because all of these qualities can be present in differing amounts. I’m essentially defining it as a product of multiple factors, and how much of a story something is varies in proportion to each.
Why only juxtaposition? Particularly in sophisticating storytelling, so much of the ur-development can actually be submerged in implication. If I say ‘x=2+2’, I need say no more; that one expression is presentation, juxtaposition, and generation all in one. The presentation and juxtaposition happen simultaneously, and the generation can be left as an exercise for the reader.
The ur-development was ostensibly a reduction of setup and payoff to fundamentals, but it can be reduced further. Dropping the presentation step feels as natural as dropping the identity operator from the SKI calculus; if an element is being juxtaposed, we can assume either it is being presented, or already was.
Given juxtaposition and extrapolation, then, I think juxtaposition is the more important of the two. It’s harder to imagine punchline with no joke than a joke with setup that leaves the rest to imagination.
You can derive the conclusion from the premises; and if you try to get the premises from the conclusion, you’re actually doing the same thing either way: extrapolating. Given a juxtaposition that’s dripping with implications, one that leads to a natural conclusion… well.
(This is not to say that the presentation step is trivial; in practice, presentation is everything. It could just as well be called ‘emphasis’ or ‘investment’, because functionally, presentation is where we set readers’ expectations and make them care what happens. It can be neglected in structural analysis, because structure doesn’t care about pesky things like not being boring as sin.)
Anyway, I say fruitful specifically because a collocated juxtaposition does not a story make. If the juxtaposition does not pique the curiosity or arouse the passions, what’s the point? It also highlights the fundamental subjectivity: you can always get novel juxtapositions just by shuffling words around. But would they be fruitful? Mostly not. Still, it’s up to taste: what’s fruitful for one may be trite to me and meaningless to you.
What about dramatic and sensory detail? When I say dramatic, I simply mean details that relate to a character’s desires, beliefs, and intents. When I say sensual, well, after writing over four thousand words on sensory reification, I don’t know how much more I can endure saying on the subject.
Still, not everything people write about is dramatic or sensual — abstract worldbuilding comes quickly to mind. (Which says something about me, I suppose.) However, I find this to be a feature. A story can include non-story content. I’m reminded of the Alexandrian’s definition of roleplaying as associated mechanics. An RPG can include dissociated mechanics, but when you use them, in that moment, you are not roleplaying. Likewise, you can explain the equations behind your magic systems, but in that moment, you are not storytelling.
The second definition, concerning stories discretely, largely exists to patch holes in the first. A story must be unified, so you cant staple Moby Dick to Ready Player One and call it one story. A story must be resolved, so you can’t take one cliff-hanging chapter out of a work and call it a story on its own. It must be repeated, so that a single poignant juxtaposition doesn’t count. (Does this exclude “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”? Perhaps).
Finally, and substantially, a story is an experience of storytelling. I say this to pull you out of the negative space you often occupy: the reader is an active participant in making sense of a story. This highlights another subjectivity; a story might include all the elements we’ve expounded, but you still may fail to process it as a story; or a story might lack integral elements, because you’re so imaginative, so well-versed, you interpret a complete story from the little you’re given, and therefore still have the experience of storytelling.
Reading and writing, then, exist on a spectrum. This places new frame around the common advice to read if you want to write; you are practicing what is, in a sense, an expression of the same skill.
And if you do read a bit, look around for manifestation of the structures you’ve been taught, you will run into an instructive snag.
The Sapling and the Sporocarp
I’ve ranted earlier about the recursive impulse. There’s something neatly compelling about nesting a structure inside itself, fractally, ad infinitum. I can’t cast too much shade when I constructed the metadevelopment just a few paragraphs ago, but I’m critiquing it for a reason.
This fractal fallacy is a bit like learning about subject-verb-object sentence structure, and thinking you can built a sentence by nesting SVO triplets inside of each other. Make no mistake: clauses definitely can have multiple verbs, and objects can themselves be clauses, but rather than clean recursion, they are adjoined and embedded — they can even interrupt each other — within clauses in more complicated ways.
Reflecting on the logic of stories, in practice they aren’t snowflakes. They have subplots interwoven, and what might be one development in this plotline branches into two separate directions as its causal effects ripple outward in the world. Even when it’s a single, contained line of development, the way it breaks apart into subunits might be closer to a polyrhythm than harmonic overtones.
In fact, let’s try out a different musical metaphor. When you learn about scales, you learn about the function of different notes of the scale. The way the tonic feels at rest, and the dominant imparts energy, and the leading tone wants badly to resolve to the tonic. Similar properties apply to chordic triads built on top of these notes.
But think about what an actual song is like. They don’t just play the notes of a scale in order (though it doesn’t sound bad when they do), and even with a fixed chord progression, variegated harmonic territory can be explored.
I don’t know if that indulgence above made your eyes glaze over, but to get back to the topic at hand, I don’t view the steps of the ur-development, or even the metadevelopment, as steps you must follow. If you look, a story might not break cleanly into 9 movements across 3 acts or whatever, and it’s not necessarily better if they do.
Instead, what the metadevelopment cycle illustrates is the role story elements can play. It’s the relation they have with each other, and their effect on the overall logic of a line of development. Some sentences are short, some are long, but they all have words, be they nouns or verbs, with well-understood jobs.
To develop an idea, you show it to the reader, relate it to other ideas, and then do something with it. To really develop an idea, each step of that development is itself developed. Development can happen on levels as small as phrases in a single sentence, or with ideas as big and incompressible as those built up over the course of multiple chapters.
Which finally brings me to my mixed feelings on outlining.
Describe apples to me, and it might not be too hard. Red or green, round like a torus, wider at the top, with stem rising from an apical depression. The bulges along its rim or base might be tricker to describe, but overall, I think I’ve done a fair job of describing apples.
Describe a specific apple, try to truly differentiate it from the great vague mass of apples, and you need much more space. You can measure its dimensions, mention the location and shape of its bruises and bumps, cut it open to count the seeds and ripeness of the meat, taste it and tongue it.
Likewise, it’s not hard to talk about general ideas, but the discussion of specific ideas, with ramifications that hook into and pull at all those specifics, is elaborate. Go back to the apples. It’s simple to refer to the top or the bottom of an apple, its inside or outside, and I can refer to specific parts, like the stem or seeds.
But what about those little bits on the bottom? They’re almost like leaves, pointy and ringing the inward part of the torus-shape after the leg-bulbs curve inward. You probably know what I mean, but that took so many more words than just saying ‘stem’ did. Is there a specific word for those bits? I don’t know one, and if I did, would you know it? I don’t think I can assume you do.
You might call this operation blowup. You perform a simple operation on a simple operand, and get a complex output. The opposite of cold is hot. What’s the opposite of an apple? Could call it an anti-apple, but what is an anti-apple, specifically:?
Stories are all about specifics. To talk about something specific, you have to lay a lot of pipe describing it, pinning it down. This is one reason I am skeptical of outlining. The map is not the territory, and if your outline captures everything it needs to, you don’t need the story.
Sure, you could pile on more detail, make it feel more like a complete story — but those details aren’t there as some proof of work on the part of the author, they should be there because they need to be. A story worth writing is not a story that can truly be outlined.
Consider the nine steps of the metadevelopment cycle. I attached more or less fitting names to each of them, but those simple ideas can get fiddly in application. Suppose the idea you want to develop, the problem you characters are facing, is something in the vein of “the toll death takes on the living.” Something highbrow like that. What could the catalyst of that be? What could the selection of that be?
You could totally workshop this idea into a story outline, but this application of the metadevelopment cycle is owl-drawing.
In practice, you won’t and shouldn’t be able to give short, one sentence descriptions of developments, not as they relate to main idea of the story, and not without being vague to the point of dubious use.
“Michael struggles with the consequences of his mother passing” — what struggles, what ramifications? There probably are (or should be) multiple struggles and consequences, all thematically and causally entangled.
You could sharpen this to specificity — “Michael snaps at his best friend and pushes them away”, for instance — and that’s better, but it’s also probably not the whole story. Short, precise, complete, pick one or two.
Earlier, I talked about the recursive fallacy, but philosophically, this is known as arborescent thinking. Hierarchical, discrete, totalizing. To write like a tree, you start with the seed of an idea, plant it. Before anything else it will sprout, and then grows its first limbs, and then branches on those limbs, and then twigs on those branches.
The image I think many people have in their head of outlining matches this: tidy bulleted lists divided neatly into chapters and acts, everything accounted for. I’ve never been able to conform my thinking to such an ideal, as much as I’ve tried.
Creativity is messy, and I’ve seen so many authors buck against the idea of outlining things for reasons not unlike these. Myself, with my ever-present impulse towards openness and universality, never rejected outlining — I always wanted it to work, but I always ended up with a finished product before I ever finished the outline.
Traditionally, the alternative to aborescent thinking is rhizomatic thinking. A rhizome, unlike a tree, is nonlinear, a multiplicity where any element is able to link up with any other without adherence to an overarching order. That’s the way Deleuze and Guattari put it, but for my purposes, I think an even more evocative metaphor is that of the fungus.
It starts with a few spores and the right substrate. A mycelium will take root in the soil and extends hyphae, filaments vegetatively yielding other filaments and so on, absorbing water and nutrients wherever found, and when the filaments meet they anastomotically fuse back together as one. Then, when the conditions are right, after a long awaited rainfall perhaps, a fruiting body will burst suddenly from the earth. Keep at it, and you’ll have a nice little fairy circle.
I find this resonates quite well with my experience of writing. It illustrates what’s, for me, the most successful method of taking notes and brainstorming a story. I simply note down whatever idea strikes and elaborate upon them as the elaborations come to me. It’s not uncommon for me to end up with several redundant description of the same events or progressions scattered all across an “outline” doc.
It’s not wholly chaos, though: every so often, it’s necessary to comb through the document, and sort through the contents. I transplant snippets of dialogue or description from here to there, and in that new spot, it might spark further connection with the new notes that surround it, and eventually knit together into the weave secure enough to support a real drafting pass, and all those floating ideas are pinned to prose.
My methods and hangups are not nearly so extreme as Slavoj Žižek’s, but there’s a certain affinity to how he describes his process:
I have a very complicated ritual about writing. It’s psychologically impossible for me to sit down [and do it], so I have to trick myself. I elaborate a very simple strategy which, at least with me, it works: I put down ideas. And I put them down, usually, already in a relatively elaborate way, like the line of thought already written in full sentences, and so on. So up to a certain point, I’m telling myself: No, I’m not yet writing; I’m just putting down ideas. Then, at a certain point, I tell myself: Everything is already there, now I just have to edit it. So that’s the idea, to split it into two. I put down notes, I edit it. Writing disappears.
Put down ideas and tie them together. You can summarize about all of this like that.