Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones

My wife got me to watch some reruns of Game of Thrones (GOT) and not only were they good (well written and acted) but they had a scope similar to the Essence and Stones series I have been working on and off at for a couple of years. There is a broad series of characters like in Doughton Abby but there is also a geographical separation in the action which while concurrent are in the beginning widely separated and slowly come together.

Anyway I will try and outline a chapter a day of GOT and begin to unravel the structure of how the epic was written. Once I understand the form and pacing I think I will be ready to begin plugging in the story I have been neglecting for a long time.

I don’t know how this will turn out so I don’t want to speculate, however I told one of my students, who is a fan of Janet Evanovitch, that she ought to outline one of Janet’s books like she did the outline she produced in the Exploratory Writing Workshop (EWW) we just completed. Since giving that advice I started thinking about the mechanics of what the components of my own outline would look like.

For example, say in a novel you like very much, you decide to outline it. What will you outline? Certainly not the story line… You would want to outline the components. The components might include some bullets of the story line to provide an internal reference and then for each describe what sort of prose and how much is being used. Say bullet one… starts with about a thousand words of back-story, then a thousand words of developing the protagonist’s character, then a thousand words of an action scene and then some discussion of the senses and emotional impact the event is having on the narrative and so on and so forth. At the end of the chapter you have a good feel for the structure that was used and the arrangements of the components..

Once this is achieved the writer would then take the chapter developed earlier in the EWW and place it into the structural context of chapter 1 of their favorite novel… Pretty cool huh? I know, I know, the purists out there will shake their heads in disbelief, but it will launch you into a proven format that turned out to be something that made a good impression somewhere during your professional development.

Anyway I think I will try it and see how it works. Already in my mind a new course is forming called “The Components of Good Writing Workshop.” Don’t tell Karen. She’ll throw something at me.