I just put arse on chair and write 
O course that`s if the feckin brains working!
4b was deliberate. The point was that, no matter what 4b is, it is – implicitly, I assumed – subsequent to 4a. If the step after 4a does not get you into productive territory, start over.
ps
This is making me dizzy. 
It all sounds so complicated.
I fall in love with a new technique every time I write yet another unpublished novel. Lately I’ve latched onto Hugh’s recommendation of the Snowflake. I’ve also diligently, and with notes, worked my way through McKee, Elizabeth George, Stephen King, Donald Maas, Ursula Le Guin, and a host of other masters of the craft far more accomplished than I ever hope to be.
In the end, I do way more prep than I have patience for, but which ultimately suits me well in a kind of peculiar subconscious manner. By the time I start writing/plotting, I know so much about my characters and their lives that when I ask the question, “What would be the most unlikely happenstance and toss the greatest spanner into the works?” the answer comes fairly easily and is mostly believable.
As for “liking writing,” I lump the people who claim to do this in the same disingenuous pile as the women who profess to gain great spiritual satisfaction, nay, celestial joy, from childbirth. I.e. crackpots. I have a great little cartoon I cut out years ago from the strip “Shoe,” with the wizened and decrepit old owl who unnervingly resembles Teddy Kennedy hunched over his typewriter and proclaiming, “Writing is easy. You just stare at the page until beads of blood appear on your forehead.”
It takes a substantial and unending supply of helpful liquids to keep my A in C, but I soldier on. And I do get those unpublished novels finished, and revised many times. Distressingly, there seems to be more involved than even that in the great slog towards actually being recognized as a writer.
(And I see that while I was busy composing all this drivel, someone ELSE drug up vic’k’s bottle and uncorked it. 
Harrumph.)
So wots new?
Typo or Freudian slip? 
Ahhh JIm! Bes this the answer wes all alookin fer? 
Sean,
The problem with using other’s analysis, is that you learn from the idea others have of the ideal form, not from other’s real works. As a student of music composition, I always wondered how different the “standard fugue model” was from Bach’s own fugues.
In the end I decided to read Bach’s scores, instead of Music Form books. Years after, I’m sure I learnt more this way, even if I hardly remember how a school fugue must be written.
Paolo
After all these years inside a whale, the memory doesn’t quite work the way it once did, but I seem to remember some writer of note expounding on his Unified Theory–must have been an ancient writer, somewhere in the Trollope/Hardy/Eliot/Forester era, or I wouldn’t have been reading him/her/other–of Novel Writing:
Take a couple of interesting characters, place them in an interesting setting, find out what they want most in all the world, and then devise interesting ways to prevent their getting it.
Repeat.
My problem is that once I have an outline, I sort of lose interest in the writing. It’s as though I have already finished the story and have nothing left to add. I blame my early background as a technical author, when the bulk of my work was preparation, deciding what to say and how to structure/present it; the actual writing tended to come later and was a bit like colouring-in – quite quick once the foundations were in place, and not particularly satisfying in itself (given that the interesting and challenging work fell into the preparatory stages).
I have tried three main approaches to fiction over the years:
(1) Just write. Every day, for a set length of time or number of words. Take one of the many ideas seething around your mind, select a starting point at random, and see how it all unfolds. Strangely enough, it does unfold and it does make a story. But I never like the output enough to spend oodles of time reworking it.
(2) Plan out the whole story in advance. Start with any situation that sounds plausibly as though it might fit with your idea. What might happen next? And what would happen if XYZ happened as well, or instead? Work out where the story is going, and what the eventual outcome will be. Does the story actually start earlier than your initial starting point? Or later? Go back and build in sub-plots. Think about themes. Create interesting characters, and put them in awkward situations together. I have tried this approach by following other people’s systems, but that doesn’t work particularly well for me because I end up focusing more on the system than on my story. I do better with my own “method”, which is really just putting a whole lot of ideas, what-ifs, target situations etc onto the page then pulling them into a structure and filling in the gaps. But in either case, once I have an outline, I lose interest and start fiddling with the next idea that has come along in the meantime.
(3) A sort of cross between (1) and (2), in which I have a very vague skeleton plot (maybe four or five paragraphs for the whole book) and plan in detail only one or two writing sessions at a time, keeping an eye on the overall skeleton throughout. This keeps my interest going, but I have yet to finish anything approached in that way. Too easily distracted by the next bright idea. And if my flow is broken (for example, if I don’t write for a week or so) then I can’t seem to pick up the thread again and the whole thing grinds to a miserable halt.
I am reluctantly forcing myself to acknowledge that, in the novel-writing arena, I am unlikely ever to be more than a wannabe. I suspect I might be a dilettante flibbertigibbet.
I told you this forum would be helpful. In these three quotes, you have what amounts to a workable, real world technique.
Are you sure? That first half of the second sentence in the middle step could be a tad problematic†. How much drinking can one do before the must move A from C to the T? Seems self defeating to me. 
†[size=75]This sentence brought to you courtesy of xiamenese[/size]
I talked about learning. Not the final outline matters, but what insights one gets while making it.
In fact, the step from concept to outline is not a trivial one. In a concept, you may be rather vague - in a concept, a sentence like “Joe escapes from where the bad guys kept him and meets his friend Bill again” is totally OK. In an outline, you have to define precisely
- where Joe is kept
- how he is able to escape
- how he is able to contact Bill
and so on. For every point, countless of possibilities are conceivable, and one has to play around with a lot of them and finally make a decision. And every decision sets new boundaries to the rest of the story - if Joe has a device to contact Bill, one has to ask why he did not call his friend to help, and so on.
A novel, which seems to be “just a line-up of words”, has in fact a lot of layers, and the cause-and-effect layer is what the outline is about. Other layers come before - for example, how do the characters develop? This determines a lot of what may happen and what not as well.
A McKee view of some of these issues.
For managing the flood of ideas: I carry around a Moleskine notebook into which I dump ideas, scraps of ideas, overheard snippets of conversation, etc. One a month or so, or when I need a flash of inspiration, I’ll troll through it and see what I find. For me, finding the idea isn’t the problem – the problem is finding which idea has enough meat behind it to carry a short story or novel. And that is a practice and judgment thing, at least for me.
As for the writing process itself: I totally agree that newspaper writing is good practice for writers of all stripes. When you’re five minutes away from your press deadline and the editor’s standing behind your chair screaming in your ear, you learn right quick that writer’s block is a luxury you can’t afford. 
I use, more or less, the “writer’s journal” approach suggested by Sue Grafton to keep me on track when I’m writing, and to plan my longer works of fiction. My pre-writing process consists of typically a hundred pages or so of brainstorming - bits and pieces of ideas, a few paragraphs of “what if?”, a running dialogue with my subconscious mind while I flesh out the roughest contours of the story. I write mysteries (all, sadly, as yet unpublished), so by the time I’m done with this step, I know roughly who my main characters are, who gets killed, who the killer is, and what his/her motive is. Then as I write, I continue the dialogue with myself, journaling before each day’s writing and talking about where I am in the story, what comes next, things I need to remember, stuff that’s going on in my life at that time, and so forth. A lot of the journal is whiny and self-indulgent, and definitely NOT meant for public consumption, but it serves the purpose of giving me a place to work things through before I start writing. Sue Grafton’s got some samples of this technique from her own mysteries up on her web site, here.
– Tammy
Tammy,
Hang in there. Your methods are instinctively right. The writer’s journal has been a favorite tool of scribblers since the early 1800s. There’s no better way to keep the pump primed on a daily basis. Learning to extract material from the daily welter is crucial. I tend to “index” my notes by using tags that are topical but also keyed to ongoing projects. Then I can batch together the notes and use them to outline and draft.
I’m wondering why you prefer the mystery genre. Preference, no doubt, and it’s also a decent market to crack. Try approaching agents with samples of your work. You may find one who’s willing to provide practical advice about pacing, characters, setting, and what will sell. Sue Grafton is quite successful, but she wrote seven novels before finally getting any published. She then wrote TV screenplays for 15 years and began to understand plot structure. She’s thus a model also for patience and determination.
D
I wonder that myself, sometimes. 
I think what fascinates me about mysteries – as both a reader and a writer – is the chance to explore the extremes of human behavior, what makes ordinary people do extraordinary (good or evil) things, and how people justify their own behavior. In my “day job”, apart from the odd freelance newspaper or magazine article, I’m a paralegal working in the foster care system, so I get to see examples of ordinary people doing extraordinarily kind things and ordinary people committing unfathomable acts of cruelty and evil. Writing mysteries is a way to try to make sense of that.
I had a chance to meet Sue a few years ago and to interview her for a newspaper article I wrote about the real-life events which inspired “Q is for Quarry”, and which took place just a few miles up the road from where I live. She is both very dedicated to her craft, and incredibly gracious with her time and knowledge.
Thanks for the advice - it’s always appreciated.
Warmly,
Tammy
Perseverance, dedication – and humility:
How about skipping the outline and just going straight from the concept to the writing? Lots of authors do this. Some even actively loathe outlining. I hate it myself, and I’ve written two novels (one published), with a third on the way.
What I often do is:
a) Basic idea
b) A sense of the main conflicts and possible resolutions – these will probably change as the book progresses.
c) Names and brief descriptions of two or three main characters (the other characters, if you have any, will probably appear naturally, out of necessity).
Finally - just get on with it. If you worrygut about the outlining you’ll never get the thing written!
Towards the END of the book, I write the outline in more detail. And at this stage, completing the very rough outline helps me decide exactly where the book is going at last.
Don’t be afraid to let your subconscious do some work for you. Write a chapter or two from thin air and see how you get on!
Oh, and I highly recommend Mur Lafferty’s excellent podcast, “I Should Be Writing” which addresses problems like this, and many others that us writers face.
Hmmm…including acceptable grammar? What WE writers face often depends on who we are. In my case, I use outlining extensively at every stage: gathering notes, writing character back stories, building a plot, and composing a draft. So it works for me, but I wouldn’t prescribe it for others. If I just wrote on auto-pilot, I’d have to scrap all the tangents and digressions and start all over. My various outlines keep me on track, and also keep the book chapters in proportion. BTW, I find that Pages '09 is quite a good outliner, too, but I haven’t tried exporting to Scrivener.
See, that happens to me if I try outlining. That or I start writing and realize that the outline completely doesn’t work and I freeze up because “Oh, noes! I’s left the map and dunno where to go now!” Or “I maps everythings out and dunno who I’m writing about!!” (Yes, I had wine with dinner. A quarter glass. I’m little.)
Whereas if I just have a general idea of what I want to do with the story, I tend to find my digressions and yank them back on-track a lot sooner. Like when my story with a slave girl as the narrator started getting too horrific and gruesome, I knew that was not what the story was intended to convey, so I backed up to where it started going that way and considered who could be changed in the scene.
Just adding to the entire “depends entirely on the writer” caveat.
I should have added in that post that I don’t follow outlines rigidly. Writing a book is much like a trip. You plan an itinerary, make some reservations, but then along the way a surprise occurs and you go off track and wander a while. Sometimes those forays change the basic plan or introduce new characters and sub-plots. But for the most part I need a plan, the more so if it’s a short piece of writing.