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Multi-Pass Writing

by Andrew Burleson | Jul 21, 2016

There's a lot of tension in the writing world between "plotting" and "pantsing," aka "architects and gardeners." I've found a technique that I think falls somewhere in the happy middle. I call it multi-pass writing, and I'll show you how it works.

My favorite novel is Old Man's War, so I'll use it as an example. WARNING, MONSTER SPOILERS INBOUND.

Start with the Ending

Pantsers and plotters alike, you have to start with the ending, because the beginning has to mirror the ending. Now, most plotters are "in to" story structure and have heard this before, but most pantsers I know (including me) tend to not approach writing this way. Rather, we tend to start with an idea seed of some kind and then free-write to figure out what's going to happen.

That's still OK, but the key is your early writing should be to discover how the story starts and how it ends.

In Old Man's War, the story starts with John Perry visiting his wife's grave, then joining the military. It ends with him winding down his life in the military, looking forward to a new life with Jane (who, through the magic of the book's universe, a woman born with his wife's DNA and traces of her memories).

It's face-stretching smile-inducing I-might-have-cried stuff.

So the "situation" in Old Man's War has this beautiful mirror, its hook and its ending tie together pefectly.

So if you're doing multi-pass outlining you've now got two points on your outline:

  • 75 year-old John Perry says goodbye at his wife's grave, then joins the military, which promises to restore his health and give him another life in exchange for his service.
  • Reborn John Perry winds down his military career with the promise of reuniting with Jane, a woman born from the memory of his late wife.

Throw in the twists

Next you want to put a little of the middle in. Generally I like using Dan Wells' seven point story structure, but you could follow a guide like K.M. Weiland's three act structure, or Shawn Coyne's Story Grid. For Old Man's war this might look something like this:

  • 75 year-old John Perry says goodbye at his wife's grave, then joins the military, which promises to restore his health and give him another life in exchange for his service. (hook)
  • When he goes in for his "medical treatments," John discovers the military makes people young again by transplanting them into cloned, super-bodies. (twist 1)
  • The military seems impressive and even a bit glorious at first, but John becomes disillusioned as his tour of duty stretches on and his friends die seemingly meaningless deaths. (reactionary phase)
  • John is sent to fight in the Battle of Coral, which turns out to be a catastrophic defeat. Badly injured, he is about to black out when he is rescued by his late wife. (midpoint twist)
  • When he wakes and begins recovering from his wounds, John is determine to find out who he saw rescue him -- could Kathy still be alive? (action phase)
  • After a difficult pursuit he learns that he was rescued by special forces, and that the woman who rescued him, Jane, is a clone born to be the new body for his wife -- but given a new consciousness when his wife died before her transplant. (twist 2)
  • Through his pursuit of Jane, and because he was the sole survivor of the battle, John becomes involved in the Special Forces. He ends up fighting alongside them in the second battle of Coral, which is a great victory. (climax)
  • Reborn John Perry winds down his military career as a hero, with the promise of reuniting with Jane, the woman born from the memory of his late wife. (resolution)

^ For a pantser like me that's just the perfect amount of outline to give me some chills. Those bullets are the major mile markers I need to hit, so now I can free-write without getting lost.

Fill in the details

Now I'm ready to start writing, but how do I decide what to write for a particular scene? For me, I usually do a little free writing and a little brainstorming to see how the inciting incident plays out on the page, and then make a little map of what I think would lead from there to the next major mile marker. That map might look something like this:

  • 75 year-old John Perry says goodbye at his wife's grave, then joins the military, which promises to restore his health and give him another life in exchange for his service. (hook)
  • John ships out to the "beanstalk," a space elevator that takes new recruits up to space, and meets a bunch of folks, including a high-school physics teacher and a real jerk.
  • The physics teacher explains how the beanstalk is a demonstration of the military's insane technological prowess compared to earth. The jerk ends up being his roommate.
  • John's jerk roommate dies suddenly of a heart attack, and the EMTs who take his body away make a rude remark about "a last minute volunteer for the ghost brigades." (foreshadowing)
  • John and his friends go through a bunch of mild tests and experiments, they laugh about how meaningless these seem, and how they thought military life would be harder.
  • The military schedules a day for "medical treatments," and John and his friends speculate on how exactly the military is going to get them into shape.
  • When he goes in for his "medical treatments," John discovers the military makes people young again by transplanting them into cloned, super-bodies. (twist 1)

^ Now I've got basically the whole first act planned out, these mile markers are smaller, and could act as chapters or scenes, depending on how much more I discover when I start writing.

Start the Scene

^ Now I'm really ready to write a chapter. So I sit down with chapter one, and I put two bullets on the screen with a bunch of whitespace in between.

  • 75 year-old John Perry says goodbye at his wife's grave, then joins the military, which promises to restore his health and give him another life in exchange for his service. (hook)

(lots of whitespace)

  • John ships out to the "beanstalk," a space elevator that takes new recruits up to space, and meets a bunch of folks, including a high-school physics teacher and a real jerk.

The top bullet is the objective of this scene or chapter, and the bottom bullet is what is coming next. Now that I know what I'm trying to write and what I need to set up next, I often have a clear picture in my head and can free write from here. But sometimes it's not as clear, and it helps to brainstorm another level.

Fill in ideas

If I'm not feeling the mojo yet, I can take those two bullet points and start dumping new bullet points between them, basically just brainstorming my ideas for story info or progression relevant to this scene. It might look like this:

  • 75 year-old John Perry says goodbye at his wife's grave, then joins the military, which promises to restore his health and give him another life in exchange for his service. (hook)

(a little whitespace)

  • John is in the cemetery, thinking about his late wife, Kathy
  • contrast her tombstone with the gaudy one next to it, some person who wasn't like her
  • he thinks about how great Kathy was, then leaves
  • he has to drive to the county seat to join the army
  • the have a dumpy office in a strip mall, its just him and a recruiter, he banters with the recruiter
  • he has to show ID and such
  • they make him work back through the paperwork, he reads off the terms of enlistment:
    • ten years total
    • no conscientious objectors
    • have to obey officers and regulations
    • agree to whatever medical intervention is required to get into fighting shape (this is the big hook, why everyone joins, it's a mystery and nobody knows how they get old people in fighting shape)
    • once you leave earth you can never come home (quarantine laws)
    • once you join the military, on earth you're considered legally dead

(lots of whitespace, then the next major bullet)

^ Ok, now that's some riveting stuff. (as an aside, this is much easier when using somebody as brilliant as John Scalzi as an example).

Write through the bullets

At this point I definitely have the scene figured out, and usually I can just start writing, deleting each bullet as I replace it with real prose.

Sometimes I'll expand an outline more than this by including the dialogue. There are certain scenes where the banter is key, and it's easy to just riff it out in bullets without any of the grammar or blocking or description etc., and then I can go fill that in later.

Sometimes, like I mentioned previously, I'll do a lot less than this. The key is, once you've got a couple major structural milestones figured out, you can pass over the gaps between the milestones in finer and finer detail until you've got as much figured out as you need to start writing purposefully.

Wrap Up

Notice that I'm not suggesting writing this level of detail for the whole book. Usually I only two the top level of bullets for the entire story, and then the second level of bullets for whatever act I'm in. I almost never do real detailed bullets past the scene I'm currently trying to write. When I do it's because I have a sudden flash of inspiration, ripping through four or five pages of fast bullets just to get it all down, then split that up into as many scenes or chapters as it takes to pace it right.

For me this strikes just the right balance between having some structure and having freedom to let the story play itself out on the page. The bit of structure keeps my writing productive, I don't have to throw away so much stuff (like I used to when I exclusively free-wrote). The sparse detail in the outline leaves me lots of freedom to change my mind about what's coming next as I get to know the characters.

For me this has been a really helpful technique. When I wrote my first novel I started during NaNoWriMo. I muscled my way through, ending up with just over 50k words in a month, and figured I had this writing thing down. But the story didn't come together in the end, and I had to heavily edit, re-write, and throw a lot of that away. I developed this multi-pass outline process by trial and error in the revision / rewrite process on that first book.

By contrast, I used this technique from the beginning on the second novel I wrote, and I was able to get through 85k words in just under eight weeks. That's not world-record fast, but I wasn't straining nearly as hard or putting in nearly as many hours as I did during that first NaNoWriMo, and the final output was a lot better quality.

I'm now writing my third book this way, and this technique has continued to be a huge productivity boost for me.

I hope it helps you as well!

Footnotes:

If you appreciated this article, I'd love it if you'd share it with your friends!

If you have comments, questions, or feedback, you can email me: hello[at]betabooks[dot]com.

And if you've got a finished manuscript and are about to start the beta process, I'd love for you to check out BetaBooks, my web app for beta testing your book: http://www.betabooks.co.

Cheers!
-Andrew