Developing Story Ideas, 3rd Edition

25 Expanding to the Finished Product

You can now expand your strong, well-tested outline into its final form, be it a short story, novel, stage play, documentary proposal, or fiction screenplay. For plot-driven works, you have done much of the tough brainwork during the ideation stage, but those that are character-driven, and those with multiple characters and subplots, will often wander widely from your initial expectations. Strong characters in literary fiction are, for instance, notorious for elbowing their author aside and taking over the story. Not surprisingly, novelists will sometimes admit that they write in order to discover what they are really writing about. So expect your outline to lead onward to a long, evolutionary process. Expect ...