Outlining Fiction, Sketching Enthusiasm
I’ve spent most of my day today outlining what will be my very first attempt at completing a fiction novel. The intent is to pick up where my nonfiction book, which I am currently in the process of trying to publish, leaves off. The locations in my novel are identical to those in my military nonfiction because I know the most about them as compared to other settings in which my readers may one day find my characters.
When I began earlier this morning, I was facing a serious case of writer’s block. I hadn’t actually set out to do any work on my outline at all. I had first opened my manuscript, which is roughly five chapters in length at its current beta stage, with the intent of writing some actual content. But when I couldn’t seem to get myself into gear, I quickly shifted to the outline. I did this because I felt that I had somehow lost my sense of the overarching storyline, probably from having let so much time pass since writing the existing five chapters.
After staring blankly at my outline, knowing that I did not like the way it matched up to one of the already existing chapters, I decided that I needed to see Pearl Harbor from a bird’s eye view. With that end in mind I opened up Google Earth and dialed in the island of Oahu. Just for memory’s sake I began to place pins in locations that had once been significant in my life. I marked my old barracks rooms, for example. I also marked each and every guard shack that I served duty in following 9/11.
That’s when it occurred to me! I had been busily trying to sketch a picture of Pearl Harbor in my mind by revisiting it via satellite imagery available through Google and I was getting very excited about the whole thing in the process. I finally realized that it would be a great thing if I could convey that intimacy with the setting of my novel and therefore transfer the excitement that I was feeling to my readers in the process. Because most books published today have websites that accompany them, I thought that it might be fun to provide links to Google images of locations in my book so readers could dial them up and see precisely where things in the story were taking place. This would add a new dimension to my book for avid readers and web surfers.
Anyway, there you have it. that’s my morning in a nutshell. By outlining my novel to what I believe will make a good ending I came up with a marketing concept that just may prove useful to the project in the future. Plus, I now know how my story is supposed to end. The only thing left now is to see if I can stay on course in the writing process and actually arrive at my newly defined destination.
Take care readers, and look for my books in the near future!
JMK
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