WRITING A BOOK FROM AN OUTLINE, PART 1

My outline is my anchor and my roadmap. Written back during the earliest discussions with the publisher, it provides a high-level, chapter by chapter blueprint of how I intend to tell this story. Here’s what the outline for Chapter 4 looks like. Chapter 4 outline I’m drafting Chapter 4 now and it’s big! Lots was going on in Muskoka between 1865 and 1870: logging moved into the district, the first steamship was launched on Lake Muskoka, townships were starting to have enough people in them that they were able to incorporate and govern themselves, settlers organized an association and published a guide for new pioneers – and new pioneers flooded in after the new Free Grant Lands and Homestead Act passed.

Every single one of these events had a direct impact on the Muskoka Road. True! If the road wasn’t being ripped up by the stagecoaches hauling loggers and equipment, it was being bypassed by ever-so-grateful travellers who could take a nice boat ride for at least part of their journey. As the townships formalized their existence, one of the first by-laws they passed was invariably one to deal with road maintenance. And the settler’s guide had a few choice words for how the road had been laid out in the district – like hello, we can’t go in a straight line, every straight line leads to a lake, or a ravine, or a cliff here!

It all makes for fun storytelling. But I get easily side-tracked – there are so many fabulous Muskoka stories. Little boys who left home to join a “shanty gang” in the bush. Individual settler families and how they hacked a farm out of a boreal forest. The wheeling and dealing of the community leaders. Without my outline I’d fall right off the rails of the main storyline.

It’s all about the road. It’s not enough that a particular fact is fascinating, funny or stranger than fiction. Any person, any event, any new law or innovation I write about has to have a direct bearing on the road. Of course, I have to give a certain amount of context so the reader gets the significance of the road and its role in the broader history of the district – but I have to walk a fine line. Too much context and we lose the point of the story. Too little and the story becomes dry and boring.

When I find myself deep in a side story, I come up for air and ask, where was I going with this? The outline brings me back to my story.