In the late afternoon, I met with Tracee de Hahn, a mystery writer. We talked about planning stories in a more tangible way and she explained her outlining structure. First, she finds three contemporary books that are relatively similar to what she’d like to write and outlines them, going chapter by chapter to write out who’s perspective it is, the setting and a summary of what happens along with characters introduced, the length of the chapter and the balance of dialogue to description. She advises using color coding to differentiate various things. Then, she lays them out on a huge poster board with tick marks every 10 pages in chronological order (ie if a chapter is from page 3-7, it would go in the 1-10 tick mark). Last, she looks at the distribution of all categories and uses that as a pattern to craft her book. For outlining her original stories, Ms. de Hahn does the same basic structure, but uses index cards with more general plot points instead of typing up specific details. The image above is an example of her outlining for Elizabeth George’s work.
