, you can’t have all variation, either . it is the pattern created by repetition and variation that communicates meaning. You have to be careful when you have the same event or adjective or discussion happening over and over again. Repetition can get dangerously close to boring. In Blueprint Your BestsellerStuart Horwitz talks about the importance of striking a narrative balance between repetition and variation: Increasing suspense doesn’t always eliminate needless repetition, and eliminating repetition doesn’t always result in suspense. On the other hand, these two categories still need to stand on their own. (My two examples below show this overlap.) Increasing SuspenseĪt times these two categories overlap: If you eliminate needless repetition (the parts that “readers tend to skip,” as Elmore Leonard said), you typically ratchet up the suspense automatically. I won’t discuss every change, but the majority of Rowling’s revisions fit into two broad categories: 1. Rewriting is the essence of writing well-where the game is won or lost. In the grid below I’ve tracked all of Rowling’s changes between her outline and the final Order of the Phoenix. Red is what Rowling deletes from the story yellow is what she swaps around and green is everything she adds after the outline. When Rowling shared her outline, she said that it was an “umpteenth revision” of Order of the Phoenix-but she still went on to revise the outline even more. (I also cleaned up the outline by writing out abbreviations and completing sentences.) Back in 2006 Rowling posted on her website a snippet of her series grid for the fifth Potter book, Order of the Phoenix.īelow is my transcription of the outline, which I created for Stuart Horwitz’s Book Architecture: How to Plot and Outline Without Using a Formula. Rowling not only plans, she’s also not afraid to revise her plan-and revise it and revise it and revise it. I know it is sometimes quite boring because when people say to me, “I write stories at school and what advice would you give me to make my stories better?” And I always say (and people’s faces often fall when I say), “You have to plan,” and they say, “Oh, I prefer just writing and seeing where it takes me.” Sometimes writing and seeing where it takes you will lead you to some really good ideas, but I would say nearly always it won’t be as good as if you sat down first and thought, Where do I want to go, what end am I working towards, what would be good-a good start? Rowling’s Outline for Order of the Phoenix I have a large and complicated chart propped on the desk in front of me to remind me what happens where, how, to whom and which bits of crucial information need to be slipped into which innocent-looking chapters. While writing the sixth book, Half-Blood Prince, Rowling said: ‘You Have to Plan’Įven when Rowling was nearly finished with the Potter series, she still extensively outlined her work. It’s like learning an instrument, you’ve got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot, cause I wrote an awful lot before I wrote anything I was really happy with. You have to resign yourself to the fact that you waste a lot of trees before you write anything you really like, and that’s just the way it is. But perhaps the feeling will have worn off by next summer. I am so sick of re-reading that I’ll be hard put to smile when it comes to doing public readings from it. Rowling’s goal as a writer is surprisingly simple: “ better than yesterday.” When Rowling sent her editor an email about the third Potter book, she wrote:
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