Once More, Outlining a Novel

 I thought I'd take a look at Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's interview of Jinwoo Chong for Full Stop, and while it was interesting to read about a writer who is getting published, I found the conversation about outlining to be quite heartening:

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto: Flux is a novel that feels so smartly and intricately plotted. I’m curious about the discovery aspect of writing this book, and if the story’s many surprises were predetermined or if some things came to you simply through writing?

Jinwoo Chong: The process for which I write most everything is to set things forth in an outline that grows and grows, including pieces of dialogue, descriptions, summaries of scenes, research links, etc. The outline for Flux eventually grew into a fifty-page document in two-ish years without ever writing a word of the draft. So the discovery aspect for me took place in the outline, and it reduced a lot of the anxiety when I actually started to write the novel.

Where did the outline begin for you?

I started Flux wanting to write a story similar to Theranos and the fall of Elizabeth Holmes. From there, the outline skewed very literary to a meta-TV show commentary discussing culture and society and how these melded with a futurist examination of pop culture. These all came after I settled on the novel’s initial idea. Then the last piece to emerge was the insertion of the show. Once these concepts were all set in place, I started to write the draft.

Why heartening? It sounds as messy as what I have done. So, maybe there is hope.

sch 3/22/23