A line or two about how to write a death poem? Back to chapter one again. A note about what the Japanese ate for breakfast? I moved that to the breakfast scene in chapter seven. Then I went back through my notes one line at a time, and every time I came across a bit of research that told me, for example, what a shinto shrine looked like, I moved that bit to my chapter one page, which takes place in a shinto shrine. I broke the story down by chapter, writing a paragraph-long summary of each chapter on a different page in a Word document. So for the very first time, I created an outline. You want to be focused on metaphors and allusions and beats and plot points. When you’re writing, you want to be putting together beautiful words, sentences, and paragraphs. But how to organize them? I knew I couldn’t be flipping back through that notebook looking for this bit of information, or that bit. I read about thirty books about Japan, everything from general histories to diaries of travelers from the Meiji Period, and when I was finished I had an inch-thick notebook full of historical details I wanted to use. I’m not Japanese, I had never been to Japan, and I didn’t even have any Japanese friends-so as you can imagine, I had to do a lot of research. The first outline I ever wrote for a book was for Samurai Shortstop. Thanks to Alan Gratz ( ) for this guest post about making an outline before you start writing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |