Outlining Struggles?

[inkbrush]

Hi lemmasoftians!

I've been having enough trouble on this one that I decided that I should ask about it on here and maybe get a different perspective on the matter.

The game I'm currently working on is an otome and is broken down into routes. One for each love interest.
The formatting for the game is set up like a calendar visual-wise. The first day of the month is on a Friday, the 31st day is on a Sunday. Each day is a Chapter. I was planning that each week had a focus on a different story arc and the weekends were going to be one-shot side-stories.

But, while trying to outline, it was proving to be causing me a lot of issues. I just couldn't figure out how to format the story itself.

So, I'm wondering if I should figure out some sort of a different format. Like, if I should get rid of the one-shot side-stories and just have a continuous story.
Or maybe something different?
Or maybe there's some outlining advice some people can give me?

[Mad Harlequin]

I've had great success with this method over the past few months. I think you may be having the same problem I did. It's difficult to outline a story when you don't account for all character motivations and scenes from start to finish.

It may be best to focus on a single plot rather than including the side stories. But if you fill in the gaps in your story, you may be able to include the side stories since your format sounds quite like manga.

Edit: I know I've recommended this method before, and posted about it already, so I apologize if I'm coming across as too insistent or annoying. I've just lost track of the folks I've talked to about it. Oops.

[truefaiterman]

My advice is to begin with the overall plot, the one that will give focus to the whole game, and using the calendar style, put the important events in certain days (if you want the week-ends to be the big days, it's perfect, but I'd tell you to use some in-between days, or create surprise events! With a whole month separated day-by-day you can do a lot of stuff!), and use the remaining days to present and develop the events that will lead to the "big days".

While everything is tied to the general story, you'll have plenty of days to focus on different characters while expanding on the plot.

You may like the way the calendar is handled in the PS2 Persona games, while considering those are full-fledged RPGs with lots of interactivity and freedom.

[inkbrush]

@Mad Harlequin:

Edit: I know I've recommended this method before, and posted about it already, so I apologize if I'm coming across as too insistent or annoying. I've just lost track of the folks I've talked to about it. Oops.

Haha, don't worry about it. xD I haven't seen you post it to me at all . . . At least as far as I remember.

I've had great success with this method over the past few months.

Unfortunately, that's not really helping me too much right now. :C

I guess it might go a ways to explain that I've already got my characters extremely developed and the base idea of their routes formed in my head. (I've re-done their outlines like 4 times before I decided to cut like half of the length of the game that I was originally planning because it was too long and outlining was becoming too time consuming and complicated, so yeah.)




@truefaiterman:

put the important events in certain days (if you want the week-ends to be the big days, it's perfect, but I'd tell you to use some in-between days, or create surprise events! With a whole month separated day-by-day you can do a lot of stuff!)

Wow, I feel pretty stupid for that idea just slipping over my head. I didn't even think about that once.
Quite honestly, I feel like this specific idea here is great and would be *ALMOST* perfect for what I need . . .


Okay, now that I've got the responses out of the way, I feel like I didn't explain enough about how my game is set up.

So, each character has their own separate routes. Much like the majority of otome games. When you get into the game, there's an introduction piece but then you're taken to a separate screen and you choose one of the love interests. (P.S. Each route is different considering the focus is on a different character.)

From there, you're taken to another new screen which is the calendar. You select the chapter you want to play and after each chapter, you're taken back to this screen. If you want to re-play a chapter to get a different result, it's really easy and simple to do.

Now, to clarify this (because I feel like there was some confusion here) . . . The calendar is just a visual device. Each chapter isn't actually a day. A full route actually covers a full school year, haha. The calendar is just a way of presenting all the chapters in a nice, simple, and easy-to-understand format.


So, now that I've got that out of the way, the only thing I'm really worried about is how the stories are going to flow.
Because of the fact that each character has their own route instead of there being an overall story and branches from that (which, to be honest, would be a hell of a lot easier for me but . . . You know . . . Go big or go home, right? xD Why take the easy way out??), because of this, I want to have some sort of a structure that each route's story will follow. That way each route feels more even as to how much content there is and such.

Now, I've discovered the magic that is a five act structure recently and I've been working with that because it kind of works perfectly with a calendar . . . One act per week or roughly about that.

So, I have the option to break it down where each week is one act and the weekends are the major events.
OR
I could get rid of the idea of the weekends being anything important and I could just have the story flow normally and just use the five act structure as the basic structure for all of the routes . . .

. . . Thoughts?

[YonYonYon]

Isn't the calendar format going to be misleading? Everyone is going to think that the story is only one month long, and BAM! it's been a whole year!
Also, if the calendar is just a format, a visual thing, what's the point in special weekends? Why are they special if they're not even real weekends?

Why not make the thing what it is - the whole year? And make chapters in, like, weeks?

[RotGtIE]

The formatting for the game is set up like a calendar visual-wise. The first day of the month is on a Friday, the 31st day is on a Sunday. Each day is a Chapter. I was planning that each week had a focus on a different story arc and the weekends were going to be one-shot side-stories.

I see this as a huge problem in your planning phase. When writing a novel of any kind, the single most important overriding imperative is to create an entertaining story. All other concerns weigh far less on the scale of importance compared to this. What you are doing comes across as a bottom-up approach, where you take predetermined chunks of time and then task yourself with trying to make a way for them to become interesting. The simple, sad reality is that stories generally cannot cover more than the highlights of any particular event or retelling of the lives of its characters. You can't possibly fill in all the gaps between those highlights, but the benefit of storytelling is that nobody really expects you to.

Instead, I would recommend a top-town approach, where you start with the premise of your story, then break that premise into whatever your major plot structure is going to be and begin describing your story in increasing amounts of detail based on its "tier." Here's an insultingly simple visualization to help get my point across because I'm so good with words:

If we think of story planning as a top-down affair, it's fairly easy to see how we would accomplish the writing of a story with a simple three-act structure. Since it's the most common structure for a story, I'm going to base my advice around it. Now it may feel uninspired to start from a vague one-line premise and go from there, and "top-down" has a very negative connotation in most contexts, I know, but there is a method to this apparent madness, and the singular goal of that method is to "Keep your eye on the prize." The prize is audience interest and satisfaction. Always keep it within your sights and you'll have a hard time going wrong as far as delivery is concerned.

See, if you start with an idea for a scene you really really like because you had it in a dream or got inspired by another work of art, that's fine, but you run the danger of putting the cart before the horse and trying to build a whole plot around that one scene you just really really wanted to put out. Your whole story builds out and above the one pillar of that scene you like, and it's not long before the whole thing crumbles under its own weight as you keep trying to make everything work for the bottom level where you started. Now, this doesn't mean that you can't skip some steps. You don't necessarily have to, say, know what resolution you're working toward if you know how you want your confrontation to go down when you want to plan a scene for it. The most important thing is that you absolutely must be able to form a complete chain from the bottom level all the way to the top before you start writing out the details of one of your scenes, or you can expect to screw it up.

When you create your premise, it doesn't have to be anything unique or interesting on the surface. It's not for blowing away your audience as soon as they see it. It's for slapping a label on your product so that potential readers will be able to quickly figure out if they're interested or not. There is nothing wrong with a premise of "He's a costumed vigilante, she's a by-the-books detective; they fight crime!" What matters is where you go with it.

Although the setup will probably be the first part the reader sees, it most likely won't be the first part you write. You probably got your premise idea from some kickass confrontation you wanted to dish out and serve up to your hungry readers, and that's absolutely fine. That's kind of why this top-down approach has been working out for me; it gives you the flexibility to write out of chronological order and still maintain most of your scenes without having to throw them away or make too many major revisions. You will probably wind up asking questions about your own characters and setting while you are in the midst of planning your confrontation scenes, and the answers to those questions will provide the bedrock for the scenes in your setup act. The most important thing in the setup might seem like introducing your characters and setting to the reader, but I think a much more important element of the setup is in establishing the readers' expectations. By that, I mean their expectations of what can believably go down in your fictional world, and of how the major characters can be expected to behave. Achieving the effect you want on your readers is going to be heavily reliant on manipulating the expectations they formed in the early parts of your story. It's what makes underdogs get rooted for. It's what makes traitors shock and anger the reader. It's what makes your resolution have the desired impact when you finally deliver it to your audience. The worst thing you can do in your setup is fail to adequately communicate the basic rules of your fictional universe to your reader, giving them either the wrong expectations or no expectations at all. You don't want your reader to have no idea how they should feel about the hero getting blasted by an evil wizard's fireball in your fantasy setting because you never made it clear early on just how lethal fireballs actually are or what the extent of magic resistance is in this world. The setup is where you make sure to clear up any questions the reader might have about just how your world works. Thankfully, most readers will assume that anything not explicitly detailed will function exactly like it does in the real world, so as long as you're not delusional, you should only really have to cover what's different.

That said, beware the danger of poor exposition techniques. The better you are at introducing your audience to your setting without making them feel like they're taking a class, the better you'll be able to retain their interest. Try not to insult their intelligence and try to exercise subtlety in showcasing the unique features of your setting or your characters. A little bit of finesse will go a long way and keep your audience interested long enough to get to the juicy bits.

Frankly, you don't need me to tell you how to do a decent confrontation. In all likelihood, it's the part you thought of before everything else, and you know it's interesting because it's the part that interested you to write about it in the first place. I'd say the toughest challenges about writing these scenes is in the technical issues. You've got to make sure to maintain your continuity and guard against similar sorts of screwups that can easily slip in, especially when you are writing out of read-order or chronological order. You also want to make sure you're keeping proper control of your pacing, making sure you don't drag anything on or cut anything too short. This is where a critical and subjective but trustworthy eye will be your greatest ally. If you cannot trust yourself to read over this portion of your story from the perspective of your audience, you'd better find a fresh pair of eyes willing to do the job for you. The last thing you want here is to have written about a gripping event in such a not-so-gripping way as to lose the reader's interest even when you had a good story to tell. Don't lose track of your pacing and don't screw up on the details, review your work often and you should be able to make the magic happen here.

Your resolution is the big test of your ability to tie it all together and achieve the effect over another person's mind that you set out to do when you began planning your story in the first place. This is why establishing those expectations in the setup mattered. This is why diligently adhering to those expectations and maintaining an exciting pace in the confrontation mattered. If you haven't lost your audience due to a slip up by now, they will be severely impacted by what you do here at the climax and conclusion of your story, for better or for worse. A rudimentary understanding of human psychology and the ability to empathize with the way people think will be critical here, and that's not something anyone can really teach, so I'm gonna focus on the bit that can be briefly explained: actually resolving the conflict in your story.

If you aren't writing an episodic story, good. This part will be easy. The fact that you aren't planning on any continuation of the story demands that you tie up all your loose ends and satisfy your audience, even if through some weepy sorrowful ending. But if you're planning on so much as leaving an opening in your ending for a continuation, don't ever let your zeal for more cause you to forget that what's left of your audience has remained because they are absolutely craving a conclusion that they can bring home to cuddle with in bed. Any questions they haven't had answered by now, they'll expect those answers by the end of the epilogue, and if you don't deliver, there'll be hell to pay. It's one thing to build up peoples' expectations and then shock them by defying those expectations, but it's quite another to build up those expectations and then disappoint them with a "Wow, it's nothing!"

The reason I depict individual scenes as requiring sections for defining their purpose and summarizing the events which happen within them is because these prerequisites act to get you under control as a writer and make sure you send in a canary before heading down into the mines. The purpose is simple - making sure you define for yourself ahead of time exactly why this scene needs to exist and why the reader should have to read through it will not only keep you on track when pumping out the script, it'll also give you that kick in the head reminding you to keep an eye on your pacing and control of the reader's expectations and reactions. Apart from that, summarizing your scene allows you to get a loose idea of what you expect to happen before you start writing it out - you can expect to bend and contort this around once you actually get into the weeds, as long as you remain anchored to the purpose of the scene and explain to yourself adequately why you are departing from the planned summary. Just like you can't expect a plan to completely survive implementation, you can't generally expect a summary to pass into a fully written script without undergoing alterations along the way. It happens, and it's the point of this kind of story planning structure - it's rigid where it needs to be, and flexible where you need the wiggle room to make it work for you.

That's all I've got. It's pretty informal and I only really picked it up on the job, but it's been working out fantastically for me, especially when it comes to tearing through writer's block. Since I adopted this process, I haven't had the problem of staring at a blank document wondering what the hell to write, and I mark that as a significant improvement. I'd say my writing speed has about doubled since I started doing this, or better. I suppose time will have to tell if the product provides vindication for the method.