On a recent edition of First Draft Friday, I talked with sci fi and fantasy author Lael Raphael about how to use the Theory of the Outstanding Question to set up a plot which will engage and entertain readers. Lael, a screenwriter turned author with a background in aerospace and nuclear engineering, shares his approach to maintaining narrative coherence without stifling creativity.
Here are some key takeaways from my conversation with Lael:
The Theory of the Outstanding Question
Lael introduces the concept of the “outstanding question,” which serves as the cornerstone for engaging storytelling. An outstanding question is a compelling, unresolved element that keeps readers intrigued. This technique is versatile, applicable across genres, and ensures that your narrative remains dynamic and engaging. By consistently weaving in new questions and resolving old ones, you maintain a narrative momentum that captivates readers.
Balancing structure with creativity
While pantsers (aka discovery authors) often resist strict outlines, Lael emphasizes the importance of having a structural blueprint. This doesn’t mean rigidly planning every detail but rather keeping track of key plot points and character arcs. Tools like timelines and character bios help maintain consistency.
Importance of character backgrounds
Lael suggests creating detailed character files, even if not all information is immediately relevant to the story. This practice ensures that characters’ actions and motivations remain consistent. Knowing your characters deeply allows you to sprinkle hints about their backstories and gradually reveal critical information, keeping readers invested.
Using timelines for series
For authors writing in a series, maintaining a series-wide timeline is crucial. Lael advises plotting out major events and outstanding questions across all books in the series. This helps in creating a cohesive narrative arc and ensures that questions introduced early on are adequately addressed in later installments.
Maintaining reader engagement
A slow part of your story often indicates a lack of engagement with the outstanding questions. Lael highlights the importance of keeping the narrative tied to these questions, using them as a guide to steer the plot and maintain reader interest. Ensuring that each chapter contributes to resolving or deepening these questions can prevent the story from dragging.
Incorporating outstanding questions into marketing
Outstanding questions aren’t just for internal use; they can also enhance your book’s marketability. Lael recommends using these questions in your cover blurb or book description to intrigue potential readers. A well-crafted outstanding question can serve as a powerful hook, drawing readers into your story from the outset.
Handling multiple plot threads
Lael compares plot threads to weaving a tapestry, where each thread represents a different storyline or character arc. By keeping track of these threads on a visual timeline, you can ensure that all plotlines converge seamlessly. This approach helps in managing complex narratives and prevents plot holes or inconsistencies.
Self-consistency and proper motivation
For any story to be engaging, it must be self-consistent. Lael stresses the importance of creating a world with consistent rules and ensuring that characters’ actions are properly motivated. This consistency builds credibility and trust with your readers, allowing them to fully immerse themselves in the story.
We had a great discussion, one you won’t want to miss! Click below to watch our 30-minute recording and hear the questions we answered from the live audience. Keep scrolling if you’d prefer to read the transcript.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Alessandra Torre: Hello everyone, and welcome to First Draft Friday. This is episode number 65. It’s titled Plotting for Pantsers. I am your host with Authors.AI. My name is Alessandra Torre and I am so excited to be joined today by Science Fiction and Fantasy author Lael Raphael. Welcome to this show. Do you want to tell the audience just a little bit about yourself?
Lael Raphael: Well, thank you for having me. So in terms of my writing career, if anybody has searched for me yet, I am not nearly as prolific as I would like to be. About 20 years ago, I started writing as a screenwriter, and over 10 to 15 years, developed from screenwriting into directing and then into production. There’s a wonderful documentary called Tales From the Script. If anyone here has any aspirations or interest in screenwriting. Highly recommend this documentary. One of the screenwriters in the documentary mentioned that he is a writer by passion, a producer from necessity and the director out of artistic self-defense.
Alessandra Torre: Tales From the Script. I haven’t even heard of this. It’s a documentary, and it is all about.
Lael Raphael: All about screenwriting.
Alessandra Torre: OK.
Lael Raphael: My previous job had a lot of flexibility. I actually moved to New York for summer and I went to film school part time, did 2 or 3 short films, and after that experience, I’m like, I am enjoying this so little that I’m just going to stop trying and came back to writing, I hate to say, but writing from a more traditional sort of thing. We’ll be discussing A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones a fair amount. And so George R.R. Martin apparently had a very similar experience. He was just a lot more successful than I’ve been so far.
Alessandra Torre: Yeah. So far. Right.
Lael Raphael: Like, yeah, but science fiction. I have a technical background in aerospace engineering and nuclear engineering. I’m qualified to be a chief engineer of a nuclear submarine. This is not that submarine. (points to his hat, which says USS Barb.) This is a historical submarine. Anybody with an interest in really interesting and not very publicized World War Two history, USS Barb was commanded by Gene Flukey. Was one of the six Medal of Honor winning submarines, for World War Two. They sank a train. They were the only American servicemen to actually step foot on the Japanese mainland during the war. And I’ll just leave it at that. He wrote a memoir called Thunder Below. Highly recommend. I got to meet him while I was in Officer Candidate School. I try to write what would be reality-based fantasy, if you will. Or, hard science fiction. And the best example I can give for what hard science fiction is, is The Martian, where there’s no new physics. Everything has to be within the current understanding and proven understanding. Because, as I mentioned, there’s the Alcubierre drive, which is a warp drive which is now theoretically, hypothetically possible and actually works very similarly to the warp drive in Star Trek. But it requires negative mass. Not at all.
Alessandra Torre: Let me jump in. Okay. Because I want to make sure that we talk about.
Lael Raphael: We got to talk about what we’re going to talk about.
Alessandra Torre: Yeah. We got to talk about what we got to talk about.
Lael Raphael: So segueing from theory. So we have the Theory of The Outstanding Question. And I was at the Inkers convention that you so mysteriously put on. The Theory of The Outstanding Question is sort of the underpinning of the notion I’ve had for plotting for pantsers. And the idea is it’s a double entendre. And the first one is that’s just an outstanding question. Who is Keyser Soze? You spend the entire movie. There’s a core.
Alessandra Torre: The core definition of an outstanding question is the question that is out there and hasn’t been answered. That’s what you’re saying?
Lael Raphael: Well, it’s a very good question. It’s an.
Alessandra Torre: Oh, OK. A great question.
Lael Raphael: It is also a question that has not yet been answered. So that is as we have just said, an outstanding question. It’s a question that has yet to be answered and that you can use that. George R.R. Martin refers to himself as being a gardener, not an architect. I forget his terminology. I’m definitely much more of an architect. Like, structurally like to see how everything interacts. You know, this is properly motivated for that. Coming back around to, you know, my origin in screenwriting, Adventures in the Screen Trade was written by William Goldman, who wrote Princess Bride. You know, a number of different amazing novels that he would also then adapt into screenplays. And one of his two points about the movie that’s more about screenwriting is that screenplays are structured. And that’s it.
You have to understand that you’re building a structure. And that your structure has to hang together. And that’s one of those things, I think, when we talk about plotting by the seat of your pants. That you’re just telling the story as you’re developing it, as you’re writing it down, as it’s occurring to you and just sort of taking notes of what’s going on in your head. And, you know, that’s a very enjoyable way of doing it. But when you go back and make changes. If you don’t also change the things that got you to that point. All of a sudden. A naive reader. Ideally, a reader who has paid you money to read your story is going to be like, wait, that doesn’t make any sense. Back on page seven, he didn’t need to do that. And what I’m trying to sort of flesh out with this idea of The Theory of the Outstanding Question is you have to do a certain amount of world creation. Even if you’re just creating your characters, you have to know more about their background than your audience does, and you have to be able to keep track. Have somewhere, wherever you have your character bio. Keep track of. Those interesting things in your characters’s backgrounds. Then what you start to do is you can lay out just sort of this timeline of your story and be like, if you know your stories, all will be one novel. Like one of the speakers. She writes the alphabet. And I was, because I knew what she meant the minute she said that. And I’m like, okay, so you plot 26 novel arcs and I’m like, hey, respect.
So knowing your characters and knowing interesting things about your characters that you don’t necessarily have to bring up right this second, but you can rely on it downstream. That’s another example of an outstanding question. One of the outstanding questions of all of Game of Thrones is who is Jon Snow’s mother? And it’s teased at and apparently if you watch the background around of the show, when George Martin interviewed Dave and D.B. Weiss, the guys who went on to be the showrunners who then did what they did at the end. But. He asked them. So who’s Jon Snow’s mother? And apparently they gave him the correct answer. Although, just for the record, in the books it’s not been called out who Jon Snow’s mother is, and it’s possible that it is actually Ned Stark’s. Jon Snow is actually Ned Stark’s bastard.
Alessandra Torre: Because you said some interesting things. So I like the idea a lot, as in, I am a fellow pantser. So, there are probably a lot of us here in the audience today. And I want to focus on this and that one as you. Because a lot of times, as pantsers, we’re figuring out our characters as we go. Like, it would be great. Like if we have fully developed characters in our minds and we knew everything about them before we sit down and write. But a lot of times we don’t. A lot of times, like, our characters are surprising us and they’re telling us things as we’re creating them on the page. So I love the idea of kind of writing down every time you do figure out something, or every time you share with the reader in the plot, you know, or in the writing something about your character writing it down. And it would be great to indicate whether or not this is something you just know about the character that you haven’t yet shared with them, or and might not, or something you actually put down on paper. So then when you go down and you kind of look. At everything you’ve written about this character, you can be like, oh, these two things don’t make sense, but it’s okay, because I didn’t actually put that thing in the book, or these two things don’t make sense. And I put both of them in the books, something that I need to go back and fix. Right.
Lael Raphael: And it’s, I would recommend. But you have the story. But then you also have sort of this support infrastructure for the story. As a writer, you have your character files. You know, you have your character description sheets. One of the things from a plotting for pantser’s perspective is just to have. And I mean, I love trying out stuff, so I’ll have like really big pieces of paper like, you know. Eight by 20.
Alessandra Torre: I’m the same way.
Lael Raphael: But you need to be able to see everything at once for that specific story. And then you also need to be able to see everything at once. If you know you’re writing a series, like, ideally, the thing I’m working on is a year on the moon and that’s going to be an interlocking story of a dozen different point-of-view characters over the course of a year living on a lunar mining colony in the year 2053. And so very, you know, hard science fiction. Everything’s going to be possible. And. That’s going to be very much, you know, 18 different things going on at the same time. And that’s very interesting to me. But for somebody who’s writing, say, your genre where things are a lot more linear And the character web is a lot tighter, a lot smaller.
Alessandra Torre: Cleaner.
Lael Raphael: Yeah, absolutely. You know, again, coming back to George Martin was like never name the character the same name — ha! Toss that right out the window. I don’t use characters with the same first letter. Yeah. OK. I’ll just name I’ll have seven different Jons in this story because. Or 18 different Brandons because apparently there’s a Brandon Stark in every generation of that family. He was definitely tired of the things he was being told to do and not to do.
Alessandra Torre: Let’s go back to the outstanding question because we started talking about it, but then we got—
Lael Raphael: Let me just finish this really quickly. When you’re working on one book, you know that the novel is a good unit, write out the timeline, put in–and this will play into what you’re bringing us back around to–keep track of your outstanding questions that you know you want to use as outstanding questions, and along the timeline when you start hinting, you know, when you tease something, put that down as a plot point on your timeline of the entire narrative. And then That will be your structural blueprint for the story. You can say OK, I teased this. Okay now. And it’s just like writing humor. Set up, pay off, set up, pay off. And ideally, the answer to your first outstanding question will create an even more outstanding question. And then that’s what comes back around to what’s usually referred to as the three-act structure, where you’re like, oh, you get to act one and you learn he was abused as a child. And then you’re like, I am the family dog. So now you have a really.
Alessandra Torre: I have a whole bunch of more questions!
Lael Raphael: And then you get to the end of act two. And the family dog is actually a werewolf.
Alessandra Torre: Right. Even more questions.
Lael Raphael: It’s definitely holding your attention. Right.
Alessandra Torre: So quick question about the outstanding question. I already, just listening to this, feel pressure like, oh, my outstanding question has to be outstanding. Like amazing. So will a normal novel have 3 or 5 outstanding questions? And some of them are small and some of them are big. Some of them get answered quickly and some of them don’t. Or are we really talking about what is the main or couple of outstanding questions that really define your whole book.
Lael Raphael: Just to be annoying. The correct answer is, of course. To me, one of the easiest ways to understand plot is it’s just a bunch of threads that you weave together, and sometimes they don’t have to go anywhere, and sometimes they don’t have to be that big of a deal. And to the extent that you don’t engage in red herrings and you don’t engage in false setups which is, you know, cliche. Like one of the cliches at the beginning of any action movie is, you know, our hero is being stalked by another burly man. And then they shake hands and hug like, oh, you bastard, I get to see you again. Like, don’t do that. Just don’t, don’t don’t do that. As long as it was interesting enough for you to think of it as being an interesting question. It’s an interesting question. You’re your own first audience, particularly as an answer. So again, it’s just a mechanism for keeping track of things. As you were saying before, it’s also a great way for you to keep track of things that are now canon. I’m not George Lucas. I feel like once it’s published, you don’t get to go back and screw with it. You know, George, much more successful than I am. He can do what he wants in his sandbox, and he has. But to me, once you’ve published that, once you’ve released it to the public, that’s canon. And if you painted yourself into a corner.
Alessandra Torre: You have to deal with it.
Lael Raphael: You have to deal with it. I’ve written screenplays. One of the best feelings has always been when you know you’re not properly motivated by something. I know that I have a problem in my story. Well, it’s where plotting gets a bad reputation is that you will have your characters do stupid things to put them in the situation you want them to be in at the end, right? And no, like, it’s to be meta for a second. Not the Facebook kind, but to be meta for a second. There’s an agreement between you and your audience. You’re going to suspend a certain amount of disbelief in order to be entertained by this story. And I promise that this story will be entertaining. And. If you have to force your characters to do stupid stuff. It just violates it’s….
Here’s an example for me. Six years in the Navy as a submarine officer. When they rebooted Star Trek and they said, OK, all the characters that you know were in the very same academy class at Starfleet Academy. And I’m like, nope. Done. Out. You don’t hand a 10 billion credit vessel over the line to a 19-year-old cadet. No, no, no. Not going there now. Completely out. And, I mean, I’ve never actually been that big a Star Trek fan in the first place, but it’s just one of those things where if you make such a fundamental error that you’re alienating your potential audience. For really no good reason other than you don’t have a framework for keeping track of these things then be better. And I think this is a very good tool, a very useful tool across genres. But coming back to, you know, to, to romance, there’s again the number of characters and the number of different characters, and the number of types of characters you know, like you have the comedic relief or you know you have the best friend you have. You know, I don’t know the genre.
Alessandra Torre: You don’t know? You don’t know anything about romance?
Lael Raphael: Well, I mean, I’ll definitely be working romance into A Year on the Moon, but it’ll look a little bit different.
Alessandra Torre: We’ll forgive you for it. This is a great question from Facebook. They asked, do you ever leave an unanswered question for the next book in the series?
Lael Raphael: Absolutely. And coming back around to the notion of keeping track of things, if you know that you’re going to be writing a series, have one big piece of paper for each novel, but then have one big piece of paper for the entire series as you know it and keep track of. And this is where we’re coming back around to that, writing the Alphabet author, where she knows that her lead character came back to her small town for traumatic reasons, but she’s not going to get back into that until book J.
Alessandra Torre: Yeah.
Lael Raphael: And because she knows that walking into it, then she gets to spend Book A through I teasing all these little things where it’s like, oh I’m not going to go through that again. I’m like, what do you mean that again? Oh no no no I’m sorry. Yeah. Thank you for coming. It’s been a wonderful evening. You know, so and that you have to have that separate page of the really big, really outstanding questions. And then keep track on the bigger scale of what things you’ve teased, what things you’ve revealed, and how you know. Again, it’s a timeline. So from here points to this. And then when you have the second revelation. It’s properly motivated because you underpinned it–coming back around to, you know, what you had in Book Two or Book Three. And this is something I definitely wanted to talk about, you know, just talking about world building, but in general, in that, you know, you have to keep track of what you’ve done, you need to keep it self-consistent. And then within that self-contained, you know, obviously fantasy or, soft science fiction, it becomes a lot more. You know, self-consistency becomes a much bigger issue in those areas where you’re, you know, writing your own rules for the universe and the laws of physics. But as long as you keep your characters and motivation and your actions properly motivated within the rules that you’ve set up. I have an equation because I used to be a rocket scientist and it says a self-consistent world. You know, fantasy/soft science fiction is definitely the best example of that. Plus, properly motivated action by your characters equals audience engagement. And it’s one of those things where it means as long as you’re telling a self-consistent story where your characters are making decisions that make sense to your audience, they’ll suspend whatever amount of disbelief they need to suspend, and they’ll keep reading. And that’s the biggest thing. You just gotta keep them reading, right? If they’re not reading, oddly enough, they stop being your audience and then you don’t make lots of money or little money or no money. You know you’ve lost your audience. So coming back around to make it as a positive statement: have a self-consistent world where your characters make properly motivated actions and that will result in an engaged audience. I had it originally as audience satisfaction rather than audience engagement. You don’t have to satisfy your audience, like, particularly with novels and with fiction in general. You can be a Debbie Downer as down as you want to go, because all it is are words on a piece of paper. And particularly that with, you know, self-publishing and publishing on demand. And if you only ever have, you know, if you only ever print one of them for your bookshelf, you know, hey, you’re out 20 bucks or 100 bucks, whatever it is. We’re not talking about, you know, a screenplay for $100 million. I was going to say summer blockbuster, but I guess a summer blockbuster. And that was 500 million something.
Alessandra Torre: Something crazy.
Lael Raphael: Something way outside your control. Yeah, but coming back again, that’s a theme within myself. It’s coming back around to that. You don’t have to satisfy your audience necessarily. But you absolutely have to keep them engaged, particularly in the middle. And, you know, middles are really hard.
Alessandra Torre: And I think about it a lot of times, it’s like keeping them in suspense. And it doesn’t have to be like scary ‘stab someone’ in suspense, it’s like, oh, they’re suspended waiting to find out the answer to this question again and again.
Lael Raphael: This is a technique that helps you know how much fish food to sprinkle in the water or what.
Alessandra Torre: Yeah, I like that.
Lael Raphael: How much do you need to keep sprinkling? You know, if you haven’t teased something in a while and it’s a pretty major thing, then that’s a beautiful way of keeping track of. This is where you can visually see if you keep that timeline again, when things slow down, it’s because nothing interesting is happening and nothing interesting is happening because you’re not dealing with outstanding questions. So whatever it is that you wrote that you had to write because you were writing a first draft, you just put it all down on the page and then be willing to completely throw it away because you had to write it for yourself and you’re your first audience. But the audience you want to keep engaged is the one with the money. So if somebody else tells you this bit of your story was just boring, acknowledge it. And I 95% guarantee is because you’re not giving them anything to do with any of the outstanding questions.
Alessandra Torre: So just to connect this to plotting with pantsers, if I understand correctly, like we’re pantsers, we hate outlines.
Lael Raphael: I love outlines. I’m a rocket scientist.
Alessandra Torre: Well, I hate outlines. But if we know like, oh, these are the questions. And as we’re going we’re introducing new questions. Those questions can kind of be your outline of sorts, because you’re really just keeping track of your questions and how you’re addressing those questions.
Lael Raphael: What have you done to address those questions? And then again, coming back into that keeping track of your timeline. Are your characters’ actions and decisions properly motivated? Because if you have to go back and rip out three chapters because they’re boring. Maybe there was one really important thing in those three chapters that you also ripped out that all of a sudden makes something that happens seven chapters later come ‘Say what?’ Yeah. So keeping track of your nuggets, it’s a breadcrumbs, if you will. Keep track of the important breadcrumbs or more specifically the golden nuggets and try to leave a trail of golden nuggets on this one big piece of paper so that you know the important things that you have to have. That informs the structure of your story. And now we’re back to screenplays, and we have completely come back around on ourselves with perfect timing.
Alessandra Torre: Well, we have one last question, but I think something you said that really spoke to me was if you are having a slow part of your story, it’s probably because that part doesn’t address the outstanding questions at all. So that really resonated with me. Okay. We’re going to have to answer this question fast. Let’s see if we can do it. From Michael, who also, by the way, said, thank you for your service. And thank you so much for your service. Well, Michael said, would you consider verbalizing any of the unanswered questions as cover blurb material so as book description material?
Lael Raphael: Absolutely. If you want a good way of understanding it. Go look again, coming back to screenwriting. The best way you can write the screenplay is from the logline out. The logline is that one-sentence description that they put in a TV Guide listing or Amazon listing. You need to be able to summarize your entire fundamental question, if you will, or your hook, in 1 or 2 sentences. And so being able to have that unanswered question or that outstanding question. Working that into your cover blurb is like, then you’ve done your job explicitly well, because now your potential audience picking up the book reads the cover goes, “All right. That sounds interesting enough for me to read the first page or the first chapter.” And then as long as they’re reading your stuff, that’s all you want. You know, it keeps the questions interesting so that they keep coming back for more answers. So the short answer is Yes, Absolutely.
Alessandra Torre: I love that. Thank you so much. We had a fantastic show today. So thank you to everyone who joined us live. Thank you so much, Lael, for talking through this with us. And if you’re interested in, and finding you, do you have any idea when your first book under this name will be?
Lael Raphael: Huh! Yeah. We’ll let you know when it’s time.
Alessandra Torre: You’ll have to come back. Yeah, on release day. So thank you to everyone. We’ll be back in two weeks with another First Draft Friday. And in the meantime, if you’d like to meet Marlowe. Marlowe is our fiction-loving artificial intelligence who can give you editorial feedback on your book in just a few minutes. You can check her out for free at Authors.AI and Marlowe is not generative in any way. So Marlowe does not generate fiction, she just analyzes it. So, thank you so much. And we’ll be back in two weeks.
