BRANDON: When I was trying to break in, I read lots of books on writing. Most of them were pretty good and pretty helpful, in the term that they gave me tools to try out. One of the books I read is Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. He also has one on characterization, so I can’t remember where this advice was. Good books, great resources. And in them he talked about how essential an outline was to him. One of the other books I read was Stephen King’s On Writing. And I can’t remember if this was in that or if it was one from the other essays that Stephen King writes. One of the most successful authors of our time and he said, “If I have an outline it ruins my story.” What happens if Stephen King has an outline is, he says, “If I make this outline, I feel like I’ve already written the book. The joy and excitement of telling a story is gone for me, and therefore I can’t write that book. I get writer’s block immediately. I have to just put interesting characters in an interesting situation and see where they go.” Scott Card, on the other hand, says, “If I don’t have an outline--.” I’m probably exaggerating what Scott says, but this is for poetic emphasis. “If I don’t have an outline everything is terrible. I need to know where I’m going. If I don’t have a structure, then my story will go crazy and out of control.” You can’t do both of these things at the same time in the same book. You can try different books and be like, “I’m going to try Stephen King’s method. I’m going to try Orson Scott Card’s method.” What will likely happen is you will try some mixture of these methods and over time work out something that is a hybridization of these two or is even more hardcore. Like, Kevin Anderson uses an even more hardcore outlining method than Scott Card does. Kevin, he writes an outline, and then each sentence of the outline he turns into a paragraph, and each paragraph he turns into a chapter. So each sentence is meant to be a chapter in his outline. And that’s how he outlines. He also writes his books by going hiking in the mountains and dictating them, so Kevin’s kind of an odd duck. By the way, if you are dyslexic or something, try that out. Dictating software’s gotten much better. And he just takes a tape recorder and he just goes hiking. He loves the outdoors. It’s how to double use his time, like I was at my job, and do two things he loves at once. It’s very successful for him. You can’t do both of these things at once. They are mutually exclusive. You can try them out. What do I do? I generally do a lot of upfront work on my outline, and I do a lot of upfront work on my worldbuilding. I do less upfront work on my characters. Once I know the setting and I kind of know the general story that I’m trying, I will then basically cast people in roles and write a few scenes from their viewpoint and see if this personality that I’m developing for this character will work. Sometimes it works right off. Sometimes it takes three or four tries until I find the right voice for the character. So I discovery write my characters in a Stephen King way, and I outline write my story and my world more in an Orson Scott Card way. But because my characters are discovery written, what that means is I am constantly remaking my outline. I don’t throw it out the window. A lot of writers do. That’s their tool. They write an outline. They’re like, “All right, now I go.” And then the outline goes out the window and they just go wherever they want to go, which is actually perfectly valid. It worked for them. But for me, I’m always rebuilding that outline, getting it closer to the kind of melding between how the character arcs are working and how the story arc is supposed to work. And my second draft after I finish the book is usually to smooth that out, to get those two to work well together. And that process works really well for me. By the way, another way of talking about outline or discovery writers is people use the pantser. If you hear that word, it’s on forums and things a lot, people say pantser for discovery writer. I prefer George Martin’s terms, which are gardener and architect. Really great ways of looking at it. Both of them tend to take about the same amount of time. Pantsers tend to, or gardeners tend to, let’s say they need generally more revision after the fact than outliners do, most of the time. Outliners spend extra time up front. Pantsers spend extra time on the back end working on their writing. That’s kind of a pun. Pants, back end? But really kind of knowing these tools, and I like to dig a little deeper in this class and try to talk about what the tools’ effects are. For instance, one of the things I’ve noticed about people who discovery write quite a bit is their endings tend to be terrible in their first drafts. If you’ve written stories and you’ve gotten to the end, and you’re like, “I have no idea, something,” then that’s an indication that you lean this direction. People who write this way tend to go off on tangents sometimes. When someone talks about their writing and says, “I didn’t know that I was going to--.” I had a friend once who was like, “I didn’t know there was a troll in my book until I got to the chapter and then there was a troll. So I wrote about the troll and the book became about the troll.” That is a discovery writer right there. Now over here on the outliner side, outliners tend to have trouble with wooden or stiff characters. This is because you’ve got this structured outline and your character sometimes doesn’t have enough room to kind of breathe and go the direction they would, so you just kind of force them to do the plot points in your outline. And because of that, if you’ve gotten feedback on your books that’s like, “The characters feel a little wooden. The plot is great. It’s a cool mystery. But I could never get into the characters.” That might be an indication that you lean this direction. And you can mitigate both of those problems. Dan used to be a consummate discovery writer, and he started doing things to deal with that. Dan Wells, my we’re friend. Where he started saying, “If I have a loose outline, if it’s an outline that’s only four or five bullet points, but I know these important moments and then I can presage an ending, then my books just turn out way better because I’m always pointed toward this ending, even when I’m doodling and meandering in the middle talking about crazy people,” as he likes to do. And if you’re an outline we’re, saying, “You know, I keep getting this whole wooden thing about my characters. Maybe I need to do some free writes with these characters, just some discovery writing, just where I have them first person viewpoint talk about their life.” And then say, “OK, how would what I’m writing contradict what this character really feels like to me in the back of my head who they are? How can I mitigate that issue?” Knowing these things can really help you develop a style that kind of walks down the middle. Because ideally, you’re going to do it all well. You’re going to have both great endings and great characters. That’s part of what makes great books. You just are going to want to see what sort of habits you have as a writer that might make one or the other more difficult. This is why I talk about tools, and that’s just one example. And hopefully during the course of this class we will talk about a lot of tools that’ll be helpful to you.