I find myself wanting to build a novel again. I say build, because much of what I’ve been doing is simply writing the story as it plays out in that conduit between my mind and elsewhere (a clogged pipeline at best). By build I am talking about a well crafted outline that identifies the individual characters and the world itself as independent entities who happen to be engaged in these moments caught on our ‘camera’ and woven together into a thread in which one character is set at the center. I don’t know that this type of build works for every story. It may be the sort of thing that works best in revision where you have a list of questions you ask yourself about each moment/chapter. I mean it like thus:
- What is the weather? How does that impact what is happening around the scene?
- What is happening in the wider world outside of the scene? What if any connection is there to the scene itself?
- Consider the characters not directly related to the ‘action’ of the scene. What are their lives? What are they doing there?
- Consider the perspective of insect and animal life. How do they view this moment?
- Think of the land itself. What is the history of place that led to this land looking like this in this moment?
I’ve yet to come up with more, but these are largely the result of a lifetime of reading asides that ground the reader in time and place and provide a solid amount of background to where ‘the action’ is taking place, contextualizing it in a larger sphere of story. In part, I’d very much like to try building an outline around these moments and seeing how that shapes the world and perspective I have on the players in the story itself. Could be fun.