Outline or handcuffs?

I’m about 50,000 words into my work-at-hand, I’ve edited what I have, and feel good about it. To date, I have followed my outline, which, truth be told, only lists scenes in two or three sentences. It is admittedly far less detailed than other writers who outline that I know, but I’ve honored the outline so far.

Yet now as I reach chapter 50 and look over the outline, I’m seeing plot threads that can be tightened and others that can be expanded.

I spent a couple of months creating the outline –– again, nothing compared to writers like Jeffrey Deaver, who says he spends 8 months on an outline and 3 months writing the book. Nevertheless, I’m leery to let go of it because it seemed so rock solid when I finished it.

But the book comes alive on the page, not on the storyboard. So my instinct is to let go of the wall and skate to the middle of the ice. (This is the first real outline I’ve ever used, after all.) Michael Chabon says he outlined The Yiddish Policemen’s Union thoroughly and then deviated (obviously successfully) about halfway through.

So how married to one’s outline should one be? Is there a point where the novel should simply take off? Os is the trick in knowing when to skate on one’s own?

My plan is to spend a few days on the outline, looking specifically at the second half of the book. Sort of a “measure twice, cut once,” as my father used to say, approach.

I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this topic.

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Some photos from my road trip to Ohio, where daughter Delaney, 21, a senior and lacrosse captain at Kenyon College had her last Parents Weekend. Keeley, 10, and I loved seeing Audrey, 18, our freshman XC and Track runner at Kenyon's rival, Denison University.

Passion and Widgets

Life has a habit of getting the best of me, and I often find myself falling behind in one aspect of life or another. There are days, admittedly, when I do not make it over to Type M for Murder to read the daily post. So I find myself sitting down later and reading posts in bunches. Today was one of those days.

As we know, writers inspire other writers. And after my binge-reading, I’m thinking a lot about my Type M colleagues Frankie Baily’s recent post and Tom Kies’ column, which preceded hers. Frankie wrote about the summer coming to an end and our respective academic lives beginning once again. Tom wrote about the different “personalities” writers have –– the artist at home, the widget-maker when we close the front door behind us each morning. Both of my colleagues seem to be speaking about the parallel lives writers lead.

I'm at a place, personally and professionally, sitting here in western Massachusetts in late August, that falls somewhere between the situations both Frankie and Tom wrote about. I am preparing for the school year at Northfield Mount Hermon school and, like Frankie, will spend the fall trying to carve out time to write among many other commitments. Similarly, as Tom mentioned in his post, I don't believe there is ever a time when I’m not a writer –– even when I'm making widgets.

As the father of a college senior, I find myself giving career advice. (My three daughters would probably tell you I have a habit of giving a lot of advice.) Part of the advice I give to my oldest is certainly nothing groundbreaking: find a job you enjoy leaving the house to go to every morning. Most writers I know would give their left arm to write full-time. For most of us, that's not an option. I feel like I have found the best combination there is: I get paid to talk about great books with insightful and motivated kids and with the adults who inspire them. I get to choose the curriculum and, as well as other classes, get to teach a course I've designed, Crime Literature. So when I close the front door behind me and go off to make widgets, often, these widgets are useful to my creative pursuits as well. Case in point: I’m making my way through Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in order to teach it this fall, and I am more awed and inspired by Chabon’s prose with every passing page.

I'm currently working on a novel that is written in multiple points of view. Chabon’s control certainly won’t be lost on me when I leave the classroom. I think writers read as writers. Yes, we love reading books. We are fans of books. And when I'm reading in an airport, I'm not highlighting. But I also believe writers read books differently than people who don’t write. There’s the oft-quoted T.S. Eliot line, “Good poets borrow, great poets steal” that speaks to the writer’s desire to find inspiration and ideas from –– and have genuine admiration for –– those who came before them. I, for one, admit to learning much of what I know about punctuation through straight osmosis. Strunk and White‘s “Rules” got me through my journalism career. I couldn't diagram a sentence until I started teaching how to do so.

So as summer fades into fall, I am grateful that my passion is connected to my widgets.