My Outline Has Revealed a Plot Flaw
Joanie cools off in cold marsh water. Chip has already taken a quick dip.
I’m approaching the revision of my middle grade zoo mystery in a methodical, strategic way. The tool I’m using first is an Inside Outline.
For a revision, an Inside Outline is a bit different than for a novel that’s still in the planning stages. Since I now have a complete manuscript, I wanted to map out the entire book, not just the major scenes. This will help me see the story as a whole—plot, subplots, characters arcs, emotional changes.
On my first pass through my outline, for each scene I wrote a brief description of the events (the plot) and why the events matter for the protagonist (the point). That was fairly straightforward.
Here are a few examples from the beginning of my first draft:
Plot: Edgar the raven, an ambassador animal, meets a small group of 11- and 12-year-olds kids on their first day of the Zoo Crew. He says hello in English, which surprises most of them. A boy (Nathan) asks whether Edgar really understands while Jazz, whose dad is the head zookeeper and is herself a keen scientist, suggests animals understand more than humans give them credit for.
Point: Edgar is proud of his ability to communicate with humans and his role at the zoo as a kind of mediator between the zoo residents and the humans.
Plot: Back in his enclosure, Edgar tells his mate Lenore about the boy’s question as the kids gather outside the ravens’ enclosure to watch the wolves being herded into their den boxes.
Point: Edgar is still smarting at the insult.
Plot: While watching the wolves, Jazz and Nathan quietly introduce themselves. Nathan’s mom is the new vet and both their parents are helping with the wolves. Jazz gets verbally slapped by Brittany, her former best friend, after explaining that a wolf is being held still with a “Y” pole.
Point: Jazz broke up with her best friend last year and is still feeling vulnerable but also wondering what she missed about the wolves and why her dad didn’t tell her something was wrong. She’s been observing them for a few weeks as part of a personal research project.
Drive the story forward with causation
Next, I went back into the outline and added the “because of that” piece after each plot and point pair. Each pair should be causally connected to the next pair.
PLOT — what happens in the scene or chapter
POINT — why it matters to the protagonist
Because of that…
PLOT — what happens in the scene or chapter
POINT — why it matters to the protagonist
It sounds simple, but adding the “because of that” piece has been more challenging to execute than I thought.
For one thing, I’m using multiple points of view (primarily a raven and a human girl). So I decided to focus first on the causality of the raven’s scenes.
Here’s what I added for the first 2 scene pairs above:
Plot: Edgar the raven, an ambassador animal, meets a small group of 11- and 12-year-olds kids on their first day of the Zoo Crew. … A boy (Nathan) asks whether Edgar really understands …
Point: Edgar is proud of his ability to communicate with humans and his role at the zoo as a kind of mediator between the zoo residents and the humans.
Because of the insult, Edgar isn’t paying as much attention as he normally would to what’s happening with his wolf neighbors.
Plot: Back in his enclosure, Edgar tells his mate Lenore about the boy’s question as the kids gather outside the ravens’ enclosure to watch the wolves being herded into their den boxes.
Point: Edgar is still smarting at the insult.
Because of that, he’s as surprised as everyone else that the wolves are being treated without warning. He prides himself on knowing what’s happening at “his” zoo.
As I struggled through “because of that” statements for the raven’s scenes, I started to see where scenes could be deepened or strengthened.
This includes bigger picture changes like new scenes as well as tweaks to existing scenes. For example, I realized the raven needs another scene late in the book to bring his arc to a more satisfying close. I also want to change some of the circumstances in the opening scenes—what the raven sees happening with the wolves compared to what the kids see.
I added notes to my outline about things I want to change. And I resisted the temptation to dive into the manuscript itself and start rewriting. I’m sticking with this thinking phase. And good thing, too, because …
Causation slip-up
After I finished with the raven’s “because of that” statements, I went back to the beginning of the outline to write them for the girl’s scenes. Throughout writing these causation statements, I’ve been skimming my novel draft to make sure my statements reflect what’s on the page of the manuscript.
And that’s when I found a plot problem in Chapter 4.
A plot element that I’d included on the outline is not actually in the story. The girl is supposed to ask her dad a crucial question, which drives the action of her next scene. But there is no way the question she asks would logically occur to her at this point. She doesn’t have enough information yet.
I must have accidentally conflated the raven’s plot line with the girl’s. He’s discovering what’s going on with the wolves faster than she is.
Plus, as the writer, I know how everything connects, who does what to whom, etc. It’s hard to set that knowledge aside sometimes and just be in a scene with a character who knows less.
No matter how I goofed this up, the plot problem is not insurmountable. It doesn’t require major surgery. A solution will present itself if I give it some space.
Resolving this problem may also address another concern I was having about the raven and the girl and how their investigations parallel each other’s too much. They need to intersect more. So perhaps this glitch—thank you, outline!—will help me find ways to make that happen.