Journal

I arrived in Scotland one year ago yesterday—exhausted, excited, and emotionally drained after leaving my entire life behind me. I’d left behind the organization I co-founded with a friend. I’d left behind a relationship of over a decade. I’d left my parents behind at the airport. I’d left behind my family, my country, and everything that felt safe, for a complete unknown. A family friend picked me up at the airport (a beacon of security in an extremely unsure world) and dropped me off in my room, and I was immediately adrift.

In the year to come, of course, my home country would rapidly destabilize, my new country would do its best to follow suit, and a global pandemic would shake the human population as a whole to its core. Somehow, impossibly, this has still been one of the best years of my life.

As a kid, I took all my notes in my diary: I always had it on me, it was a journal I loved, and I always knew where to find my school notes, my maps, my keys to secret languages… Everything I scribbled down.

At the beginning of term last year, a friend of mine mentioned she was going to try and write in a single notebook for the duration of the program, and I decided to return to my roots.

I’m glad I did, because the pandemic hit in the second term.

There’s no straightforward path to becoming a successful writer. (Or if there is, I wouldn’t know about it, since I’m not one. Not yet.) But there are a number of ways to make money at writing, and the more you put out there the closer to becoming “successful” you get.

(Side note: success is what you make of it. My personal definition of success is “the ability to live comfortably off money earned from writing while also writing whatever I like”, which is… asking quite a lot of the universe, unfortunately.)

My dissertation project, working title Antikythera, is set in the early 4th century BCE. I’m well aware that my main characters’ contemporaries are long dead. Their ancestors are long dead, or at least so well-scattered it’s hard to trace the family tree. I’m well aware that none of their friends are going to come up and tell me I’m doing it wrong. I know, logically, I have a little wiggle room.

It’s just so… awkward.

Outlining gives me the scope to do a little content editing as I go, and it means I can nudge the characters in the right directions when I need to. It gives me a level of omnipotence I wouldn’t really get otherwise, which streamlines the whole process and means I can actually finish my projects.

One of the biggest problems with outlining is that it can lead to a rigid plot without much room for character interaction. If you just write down a list of places you want your characters to end up, you’ll find yourself staring at your characters while they refuse to move or react to anything. I suspect this is the problem most people have with outlining: it’s hard to translate natural characterization into bullet points.

But it’s not impossible.