Narrative Proofs

I have been working on a new story idea lately, and as I push concepts around to see if I can actually make a story out of my idea, I have come to the somewhat startling realization that what I'm essentially doing, when I put together the barest of bare-bones original outline for novels, is creating a sort of mathematical proof of the story.

For those of you who slept through maths in school, a proof is a demonstration that a statement is true, using deductive reasoning. Sort of like a syllogism, you know. You essentially create a list, or a chain, of statements, each statement building off the preceding ones. Oh, go look it up. This isn't a math class.

Anyway, one of the very first things I do when I have an idea is begin attempting to build a story, creating a "proof" of the story. Me, I like to imagine the outcome of my premise as soon as possible, because my essential definition of a story is "a narrative describing how some state of affairs came to be." That means that I am telling my reader how we got to the end of the book, and that ending is the most important thing about the story. So I am working my way to that end, step by step, in my "proof."

For example:

I have this idea about innocence, and I get the concept Red is walking to her grandmother's. For whatever reason, I decide that I want Red to end up with a strong character. A woodsman, say. So my premise is "Red is walking to her grandmother's" and my endpoint, the theorem I wish to prove, is "Red ends up with the Woodsman." How do I get from my premise to my theorem?

1. Red walks through forest
2. Red ends up with Woodsman

I could have Red meet the Woodsman, they fall in love and run away together. Say, that's...dull. No conflict, no drama. I could have them meet and hate each other, and for some reason they get thrown together and have to solve a problem and see that they are indeed not only compatible, but they are attracted to each other. So that's more interesting. So I need a problem.

1. Red walks through forest
2. Red meets Woodsman
3. Red and Woodsman don't get along. Lots of conflict.
4. Red and Woodsman go separate ways
5. Red and Woodsman solve problem
6. Red ends up with Woodsman

So good so far, as Richard Butler used to say. So what's the problem they're going to solve? Maybe there's an evil creature in the forest. Like, I don't know, a wolf?

1. Red walks through forest
2. Red meets Woodsman
3. Red and Woodsman don't get along. Lots of conflict.
4. Red and Woodsman go separate ways
5. Red encounters Wolf, who is Very Bad
6. Wolf does Very Bad things
7. Red and Woodsman give Wolf his comeuppance
8. Red ends up with Woodsman

And so on and so forth. The original outline, the first "proof" of my WIP "Cocke & Bull" looks like this:



As you can see, it's just a list of chapter titles, but the titles all meant something to me and I could follow the narrative down the list and see that it all made sense and led from the premise to the theorem (the ending I envisioned). So I have, at least at the very basic compositional level, a fairly rigorous method to establish the character arc and the plot arc (the plot arc is a function of the character arc in the way I write), and I need to have this in place before I can start to write. There's loads of room to improvise, and sometimes the "proof" changes drastically as the ending changes. I am currently working on a change in the novel that's in my agent's hands, and for the last week or so I've been knocking myself out trying to create a workable "proof" for that novel that allows the story to work if I make the change I have in mind. It's been a job of work, getting that "proof" to function all the way from start to finish. I've wasted lots of paper making up versions of the story that don't work at all, but thankfully I have stumbled upon the Big Idea that will let my new idea play out correctly.

Anyway, as you can see these attempts to create informal proofs of the narrative are really just a form of brain-storming that result in lists. I'm a big fan of lists, though sometimes I make charts instead. Look back at the hand-written list of chapter titles for my WIP. As I begin to write each chapter, usually I don't just jump immediately into the prose, but instead spend an hour or so making one of my informal "proofs" of the chapter, so I know what I'm doing. These are looser in structure than what I've got above, and are combinations of lists and chunks of dialog, mostly. I have several notebooks lying around the house just for working out these sorts of proofs.

So my point, if I have any today, is mostly just to say that I realized at about 3:00 yesterday afternoon that what I was doing when working out my original story ideas was to create these informal mathematical proofs, and I think that's sort of interesting. To me, anyway. Does anyone else work in a method similar to this? I know that we have here our share of "seat of the pants" writers, so likely this post has been a long yawn-fest for you. But I'd be very interested to see examples of other people's outlines, if possible. Or descriptions of outlining processes, especially in the initial stages of pulling a novel together.