His specialty was, in fact, adaptations. I thought, "Hey, it would be hilarious if I won the mentorship and then used it to workshop Blackbirds, thus turning the unfinished novel into a finished screenplay and then back into a finished novel." Of course, I had no interest in screenwriting and no talent in that regard and I expected nothing. Blackbirds – which then remained without a title – threatened to become just another useless junk drawer manuscript.

Except, oops, I won.

So, I got to spend the year workshopping the story into a script. Susco, it turns out, grew up like five minutes down the road from me and went to my high school, so we had that connection going for us, and I found his advice always spot on. His first and most critical piece of advice was the one I'd longresisted:

Outline your work.

Outline your work.

I thought, "Eeesh, that'll kill my story! It stomps on all the magic." Which is a lie, of course, a chumbucket brimming with gory gobbets of self-deception, and he made it clear that the business of screenwriting was very much about outlines. He told me to learn to write them and, even better, learn to love them.

A year later, the Blackbirds script was complete and the story was done and I spent time again turning it back into a novel. I followed the script (which was now itself a big giant outline) and deviated where appropriate, as films are not analogous to novels.

I think all told, between script and novel, Blackbirds went through eight or nine solid drafts. Some drafts operating as total rewrites.

And odd process, but it found its feet in the end. And now I know a lot more about writing novels (rather than thinking I knew a lot about writing novels).

Okay, so outlining is key. But how do you do it? You're the king of online writing advice, so: what's Chuck Wendig's Official Guide to Outlining a Novel?

The king? I demand a crown! And a jester! And a throne made of the bones of failed writers! I shall sup from my goblet of ink and bark commandments at floundering penmonkeys everywhere! Fetch me my whisky, lackeys!

Ahem.

I do dispense what I call "dubious writing wisdom" at my website, terribleminds.com, but writers shouldn't hope to find any gospel there. That said, I think it's important that writers talk about what they do, and one of the things I talk a lot about is outlining. Some writers can get away with not outlining – "pantsing" is, I believe, the favored term – but some writers can't and then try anyway. I was one of those writers, as noted. Panster at heart, plotter by necessity.

Just the same, I don't outline in any one specific way. Every book demands a different outline. The one common technique between all my outlining is that I always like to identify my tentpoles – what five or ten plot points absolutely must happen for this whole thing to stand up? Plot points that, if I miss them, the whole tent falls down and smothers both writer and reader under a polyester death tarp.