The Franklin-Edgerton Outlining Method Revealed!

I went to journalism school. It’s one of the tracks high school guidance counselors recommend to kids who want to write. If you’re like me, you get two years into your coursework before it dawns on you that the profession expects to you do things that terrify you. Namely, ask questions of complete strangers and become an absolute noodge in service to The Story.

My college years were solidly in the 1980s, which meant that some of my writing professors were products of the era of New Journalism, which was born in the 1960s and epitomized by the nonfiction work of such writers as Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Jimmy Breslin, and countless others.

The first rule of New Journalism is that great nonfiction can and should borrow its techniques from great works of fiction. Because newspaper and magazine stories are short, the ideal model for a nonfiction article is the fictional short story.

Why? A great short story has a beginning, middle, and an end. A great short story gives us characters that we care about. It’s dramatic, romantic, exciting, suspenseful—depending on dictates of its genre. And regardless of genre, great stories suck you in and keep you reading. If journalists could do all that in the pages of a daily newspaper or a magazine, well, wow, they would really be onto something.

In my day, one of the oft-anthologized stories first-year journalism students encountered in their textbooks was one called “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” by Jon Franklin, a onetime science writer for The Baltimore Sun.

The story was simple. I’ll sketch it out in broad strokes, and beg your forgiveness for the eventual spoilers. A patient named Mrs. Kelly was born with a tangle of malformed blood vessels in her brain. The defect worsened as she got older, generating life-threatening aneurysms and a host of medical issues. Blindness in one eye, hemorrhages, loss of taste and smell, seizures—not fun stuff. When her brain started causing leg paralysis, Mrs. Kelly decided it was time to address the problem once and for all. She was sick of living with the monster—her words—in her brain. The trouble was, for most of her life this Gordian knot was regarded by most doctors as largely inoperable. But medical science and technology were changing. A doctor named Ducker thought it was now possible to repair the tangle. But as he and his team warned Mrs. Kelly numerous times, the surgery might well kill her. The patient agreed to take the chance. She didn’t want to live another minute with this thing in her brain.

Again, remember, this is a true story. If there is tension in this story—and believe me there is—it’s there as the result of good reporting. I can’t tell you how many times as a student I’d read a piece of creative nonfiction, and ask the professor something along the lines of, “But how the hell could Talese have known what that dude was thinking?”

The answer was always the same: “He asked.”

(See earlier reference to being a damned noodge.)

Franklin’s genius was to structure his nonfiction article from the POV of the doctor, not the patient, from the moment the doc started his day at 6:30 AM until the conclusion of the surgery at 1:43 PM. The writing is vivid, tight, and painfully suspenseful.

The article ran for the first time in The Baltimore Evening Sun in December 1978, and has the distinction of being the first newspaper feature story to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Franklin later went on to teach journalism. His book, Writing for Story, became a classic, the book nonfiction writers recommend to anyone who wants to make “real” stories come to life on the page. In the intro, Franklin talks about his struggles as a young newspaperman. He kept bashing his brains against his typewriter, hoping to find the secret to organizing his copious notes into cogent reads. Reporters amass a ton of real-life facts in their notebooks, and they can easily make the assumption that the recitation of those facts will necessarily lead to a decent piece. Wrong, says Franklin, without a plan you will more often descend into “spaghetti-ing”—the endless unfurling of facts that lead nowhere.

If he wanted his stories to have an impact, he realized that he could model his pieces on the work of great short story practitioners. The outlining method he preached was innovative at the time. When my wife and I discovered it in the early 2000s, we often started our nonfiction books by crafting out a beat sheet in the Franklin style. Denise used Franklin’s method help her structure not only her first big nonfiction book but each of its chapters. When she saw our Post-It-festooned copy on my desk when I was writing this post, her first response was, “Oh—I should use that for the one I’m writing now!”

Before I get to the method, let me switch genres—and jump back in time. It’s August 2014. The crime writer Les Edgerton describes on his blog an outlining method that he has used forever. He talks about learning how to outline in school as a kid, and how horrible that Roman numeral-A, B, C method was. Most writers are intuitive. They don’t need anything that detailed, confusing, and worthless.

To write his short story “I Should Seen a Credit Arranger,” for example, Edgerton tells us that he hammered out the following outline:

• Debt endangers Pete
• Tommy cons Pete into a kidnapping
• Pete and Tommy botch the kidnapping
• Pete escapes
• Pete pays for mistake

That’s it—five bullet points that quickly summarize the flow of the action. No line is longer than six words. With this outline, Edgerton tells us, he was able to write an 18-page short story, and later expand that story into a 92,000-word novel (The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping, Down & Out Books, 2014). The same outline worked perfectly for both. His discussion of the method is short and sweet; I urge you to read it at the link above because I am intentionally leaving out the good stuff.

Les taught this outlining technique to all his fiction-writing students, and at least 20 of them had gone on to land book deals, so he felt he was onto something. When someone thanked him in the comments of this blog post, he wrote: “I wish I could take credit for it, but I came across it years ago in a craft book and I wish I could remember the author so I could give him credit!”

As soon as I read the post, the cadence of those five punchy beats were immediately familiar to me. I shot him a note, telling him that he was using Franklin’s method. Considering his interest in long-form journalism, Franklin never applied the method to fiction. And that, I told Edgerton, was something I had struggled with ever since. It seemed to me that I ought to be able to apply Franklin’s method to my fiction, but doing so successfully kept eluding me. Prior to this, my story outlines were quick, dirty, and sloppy. (I’ll share some in a future post.) But Edgerton’s post is geared specifically for fiction, and shows us how to use it to craft not only stories but entire novels.

Man, was he pleased when I wrote him. “I hated not being able to give him his proper credit,” Edgerton wrote me back. “I have or had all of Jon’s books at one time but can’t locate it now so may have lost it.”

At first glance, Franklin’s outline method doesn’t look like much. It doesn’t seem like such a big deal to jot down five bullet points on a scrap of paper, and start writing. But the essence of your story boils down to choosing the right verbs in your outline.

Watch how Franklin’s outline evolved before he wrote “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster.” (And here, folks, we get to the spoilers—forgive me.)

His first outline read:

Complication: Woman gambles life
Development:
1. Ducker enters brain
2. Ducker clips aneurysm
3. Monster thwarts Ducker
Resolution: Woman loses gamble

Notice: the 1^st and 5^th points on the five-point outline are connected to each other. Complication must lead inevitably to Resolution. In the parlance of fiction, we have an inciting incident, following by three action points on the try-fail cycle, and a conclusion.

Franklin was writing a newspaper feature article. And yes, the piece was sad, but he didn’t want to bring down his readers. So he tried another outline, this time from the doctor’s POV:

Complication: Ducker challenges monster
Development:
1. Ducker enters brain
2. Ducker clips aneurysm
3. Monster ambushes Ducker
Resolution: Monster wins

This story was better, but still depressing. Franklin tried one more time, hoping to inject a ray of hope.

Complication: Ducker gambles life
Development:
1. Ducker enters brain
2. Ducker clips aneurysm
3. Monster ambushes Ducker
Resolution: Ducker accepts defeat

At the end of the operation, an exhausted Ducker staggers out of the operating room. He eats his brown-bag lunch in the hospital cafeteria, where he manages to respond to a few of Franklin’s questions. As he bites into his sandwich, you can just tell how crushed he is, but he must go on. There are tons of other patients out there, and he can’t let this outcome bring him down. He is a neurosurgeon, and this is the life. He will live to defeat more monsters, again and again.

Franklin, a reporter writing about real people, understood, captured, and reflected for his readers the greatest truth any story can ever share. Defeating monsters is one of the greatest themes in fiction. Possibly the greatest metaphor of them all.

After our exchange, I never connected with Edgerton again. In January 2024, when I saw that Franklin had died at the age of 82, I made a note to contact Les Edgerton. I thought he might find the news of interest. But it also occurred to me that Edgerton’s blog posts had for some reason stopped appearing in my RSS feed.

Investigating, I learned that Les himself passed away at age 80 in 2023 of complications from a bout with Covid. His work and his classes shaped many writers in the crime fiction community, and I know he is missed.

Both of these gentlemen—who never met—are forever linked in my mind by this single outlining method. One who unabashedly borrowed it from the world of short fiction, and the other who sensibly returned it.

---

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Everybody Knows...

The small town or village has long been a popular site for mystery fiction, especially murder.  And, of late, for supernatural, spooky, sinister things.  Mayberry meets Twin Peaks meets Stranger Things.  That kind of thing. 

But the truth is - sorry fans! - there's not many covens, although there's plenty of huddling over a Ouija Board or a Tarot Deck, just for the frisson of getting a message...  And there's usually one person in that huddle who's secretly manipulating the messaging, because it's easier than you might think, and it's fun.  They're not a witch, just a control freak.  Lots of those in a small town.  

There's also always at least one person who believes that there is a Satanic coven that's manipulating all the kids. ("Why else would they be doing drugs and having sex and leaving graffiti all over the school bathroom?  We never did that!"  No, you got drunk, had sex, and left graffiti on rocks at the local park.)  And everyone seems to have a pet conspiracy theory, from flat-earth to aliens really do greet every President who's elected...  And some are weirder than that. 

But I pity any alien, demon, or hostile alternate dimension who tries to go up against the Boss Bull and/or Boss Cow of any small town:  if you've ever tangled with either, you know that Logan Roy has nothing on them.  They're just far more polite during the fileting.  

BTW, the Boss(es) are rarely the Mayor, sometimes not even Councilmember (city or county), because why should they have to do all that scut work?  Endless meetings and paperwork are not that appealing, when you can sit home with a phone and a drink and tell people what to do from afar.  

As to crime, there's a lot more murder in fiction than in reality.  In reality,  there're lots of drugs, theft, especially embezzlement, vandalism (usually teenagers but not always), drunk & disorderly with or without assault, simple assault, sexual assault, and, finally, murder, which happens just infrequently enough for people to say, "I'm shocked, shocked!  That kind of thing doesn't happen here."  

Note:  Embezzlement is very common because the actual pay in small towns is pathetically low for almost all jobs, with no health insurance, which leads to a lot of medical debt.  And ever since gambling became legal, with slot machines in every bar, there are a lot of gambling addicts.  Hope springs eternal and all that.  Interestingly, most people who embezzle are caught (Though it often takes a while), but very few actually go to prison for it.  It's mostly restitution and fines, maybe a brief jail sentence.  And, as I said in a prior post, they're usually rehired in the same town, because there's not a sizeable job pool to draw on.  

There are also a lot of drugs.  Not just marijuana, but meth, heroin, and fentanyl.  The Boss' (grand)son or (grand)daughter has been known to be the major drug dealer.  Or victim.  Or both.  

BTW: For those who move to a small town and want to get "in", there are a few paths:

• Born and/or marry into an old family - Antebellum antecedents in the South, pioneers in the Midwest / West.  Money and / or land (in abundance, especially out West) helps considerably.  
• Wealth - Start a business that brings lots of money to the community, and you will soon have power, clout, and probably a spouse for you and/or your children from one of the "old families".  
• Freakish charisma and likeability can also work pretty well.  Of course, it can always evaporate, and then you're back on the bottom again, if not run out of town.

BTW, Boss Bull and Boss Cow are sometimes - but not always - married, not always to each other, and often can't stand each other.  But they do know perfectly well how to work with each other to stop anyone else from replacing them and their minions.  For one thing, they often don't take the obvious leadership positions, but pass those on to Useful Idiots.  

Ironically, Useful Idiots almost never realize they're useful idiots.  The Dunning-Kruger effect is a real thing, and applies to more than knowledge.  Generally Useful Idiots are elected to the top positions in town or church or boards because s/he will be easily manipulated, and will take all the blame for when things go wrong.  But s/he actually believes that s/he is the best person for the job, and popular because of her/his wisdom and expertise.  They are almost never undeceived.  I know one small town where the mayor was reelected time and again with no opposition and thought it proved the people loved him, but it was because Boss Bull or Boss Cow had made it clear to everyone that he was the one who'd been chosen.  

The Bosses also generally have at least one Court Jester around at all times.  These are people who will do anything to ingratiate themselves with one or another of the Bosses.  Compliments, fawning attention, praise:  the Boss can hit the worst hook you ever saw, and they'll say, "Great shot! Shame that gust of wind came up" - you know the type.  Constant errand running, "helping out", etc.  And, depending on the age, youth, attractiveness, etc., there might be sex...  Of course, when the fit hits the shan, so to speak, it's never the Boss' problem.

Speaking of Boss Bull and Boss Cow, the one person they never mess with is the Encyclopedia - s/he knows the history of everything, everyone, and where most if not all of the bodies are buried, while being discreet enough to keep from being murdered her/himself.  At least in real life. Fiction kills them off all the time, which is one of the reasons why "Midsomer Murders" is so popular. 

The Bosses also (almost) never mess with are people who can actually do things they want done.  The locksmiths, mechanics, gardeners, carpenters, roofers, plumbers, electricians, dentists, doctors, nurses, ophthalmologists, etc. ... they are all actually useful, and so are left alone to do their jobs.  

Just don't get too uppity. 

And don't try to take over for the chosen Useful Idiot and run for office.  

And don't be stupid, be polite and helpful and smiling. Always.

And make sure, when moving to a small town, you find out as quickly as possible who the Bosses are.  

*****

BSP!  BSP!  BSP!  

Thanks to Barb Goffman, my story "Sophistication" appears in Black Cat Weekly #149, available at Wildside Press or Amazon.

Hi Mark Thielman!  Good to see we share a cover and a magazine!  And love your story, "Dramatis Personae!"

Robert Towne

Robert Towne died a week ago, Tuesday.  He was 89, which surprised me, because I’ve always thought of him as being more or less my age.  Probably because he managed to capture so effectively a kind of consciousness that seems particularly ours, this generation, a neo-noir sensibility, the shadow of Viet Nam and the Cold War.

Chinatown is of course his most famous script, and it led the death notices.  Bill Goldman, another celebrated screenwriter we lost not so long ago, remarked that his obituary would lead with Butch Cassidy, although he was credited on two dozen pictures, and acknowledged to have worked on thirty others.  Bob Towne is credited on nineteen features, and uncredited on at least as many, at last count.  He took money under the table as a script doctor on any number of projects.

The best-known movies he worked on, without a formal writing credit, are Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather.  Francis Ford Coppola, accepting his screenplay Oscar for Godfather, went out of his way to share Towne’s contribution.  Towne did unspecified work on The Missouri Breaks, Marathon Man, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, and 8 Million Ways to Die.  He wrote Greystoke, wanting to direct it himself, but had to surrender the script because of money problems.  He was grievously unhappy with the finished picture, and took his name off the screenplay.  When it was nominated for the Oscar, he used his dog’s name. 

He directed four of his own scripts.  The first, Personal Best, released in 1982, is a jock picture, about track and field, and I myself have a real soft spot for it.  Siskel and Ebert put it on their Top Ten list, but it tanked at the box office.  Was it the lesbian angle?  Seems hard to credit; it’s all very innocent and sort of summer camp –there’s a fair amount of locker-room nudity, but Porky’s it ain’t.

Towne’s second movie as a writer-director is Tequila Sunrise.  Terrific title, for openers, the Eagles song.  Next, there was star power, Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kurt Russell.  Third and last, though, it’s easily the most generic of Robert Towne scripts: Cagney and Pat O’Brien as kids together, who grow up on opposite sides of the law.  And the studio imposed a happy ending; as originally written, Mel’s character was a moth to the flame, he didn’t live to see the credits.

It’s hard, with all due respect, to see Without Limits and Ask the Dust, the two later pictures Towne wrote and directed, as other than vanity projects.  Now, these days there’s really no such thing.  You pitch a movie, and convince the suits you can give them a return on their investment.  And apparently a story about the runner Steve Prefontaine was convincing enough (Without Limits).  It’s sort of curious that it bookends Personal Best.  I don’t know that you can say the same of Ask the Dust, an honest effort, but it simply doesn’t take wing.  Salma Hayek glows in the dark; Colin Farrell is in the wrong movie.    

You can only wonder if it’s just the breaks, somehow.  I look at Walter Hill, and John Milius, for example, both a little younger than Towne, but both guys who toiled in the trenches.  (Towne’s first two feature credits are for Roger Corman grindhouse pictures; Milius started out at American International, a longtime poverty row independent.)  Hill got lucky, and was picked up by the majors, his second produced screenplay was The Getaway.  He moved into the director’s chair with his sixth script.  

He’s kept writing and directing and producing.  Milius a slightly different kettle of fish.  A lot of scripts and stories, not anywhere near as many features as a director – seven only, so far.  But like Towne, he’s also worked uncredited.  Get this.  Dirty Harry, Jaws, the second Indiana Jones, Red October, Saving Private Ryan.  I’m thinking they kept pursuing commercially successful stuff, and maybe Bob Towne did too, but somehow less energetically.  That can’t be right.

Robert Towne’s last screen credit is Mission: Impossible 2, in 2000.  There are half a dozen projects since, for Mel Gibson, for David Fincher, but they didn’t get off the ground, for whatever reason.  It seems weird to me.  Did people stop knocking, or did he simply decide not to answer the door?  Dunno. 

Guy wrote some God damn good movies, though.  Which isn’t a bad epitaph, at all.

“I want to write a movie for Jack.”
“What kind of movie?”
“A detective movie.”
“What’s it about?”
“Los Angeles. In the ‘30’s. Before the war.”
“What happens?”
“I don’t know.  That’s all I know.”

(Quoted by Ty Burr, The Washington POST, 07-03-2024)

Giving Voice to Your Characters

Last week a fellow writer early in her career asked me about voice. Could I explain it to her?

I told her that voice is the way you make your characters sound real, how you enable them to come alive instead of lying flat on the page. It is the way you differentiate your characters through what and how they think and talk. Not just their word choices but their cadence, whether they speak in full sentences most of the time, whether they trail off often or interrupt others a lot. Whether they use slang or curse words. Whether they use a lot of long or short sentences or if they have a nice mix. Whether, to boil it down, they have attitude. Whether, to bring us back to the beginning of this paragraph, they feel real.

The author asked if I could offer any examples. She learns better through examples. In case you do too, here are some from three of my recent stories.

From “Beauty and the Beyotch,” published in 2022 in issue 29 of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine: 

        I smoothed my shirt as I neared the lobby at lunchtime the next day, hoping it hadn't wrinkled. You're overthinking things. Kids don't care about stuff like that. I just wanted them to like me.

Can you tell that character, Joni, is a nervous teenager who often doesn't fit in? She is worrying about wrinkles, for Pete's sake. Her desperation oozes off the page.

Let's turn to the two other main characters in that story. Here's a bit of dialogue between Elaine, the first speaker, and Meryl.

        “A teapot? You expect me to be happy playing a teapot?”

        “Well—”

        “So you think that ho will steal the lead from me.”

Does Elaine come across as a bitch? Her attitude is snarky and entitled. She cuts Meryl off, not letting her answer the very question Elaine asked. She uses mean words about another girl, Joni. She may not be likeable, but Elaine certainly has attitude. She feels real.

From “Real Courage,” published in 2023 in issue 14 of Black Cat Mystery Magazine     

        Four years later, on a warm spring Saturday night my sophomore year of high school, I ended up down the block at Dereck’s house. He was throwing another rager. Kids were everywhere, smoking cigarettes and weed and other stuff I didn’t want to know about. Someone had smuggled in a keg, and someone else had made Jell-O shots. Music was pumping, and I was glad to be there. Glad to be out of my tomb of a house, where the lights were always dim and it was always quiet and my dad was always reading in his study. He’d retreated there after my mom died and pretty much hadn’t left. Books were his escape, he once said. I understood. But sometimes I needed to let loose.

That was Connor talking. He's a fifteen-year-old kid who fits in socially, who loves his dad and doesn't rag on him, but who also wants to live differently than his dad does. His dad would describe their house as peaceful. Connor calls it a tomb. He talks about his need to let loose. Imagine if Joni from “Beauty and the Beyotch” were at the this party. Okay, Joni would never go to that party, but imagine if she did. She would never think she needed to let loose. That idea wouldn't would cross her mind. Joni would be focused on what to say and who to talk to so she would fit in, and chances are, her awkwardness in what she said and how she said it would make her stand out as a girl who didn't fit in.

From “A Matter of Trust,” published earlier this year in the anthology Three Strikes--You're Dead!:

        You can do this. It’s not like I was incredibly out of shape. Just sported a little extra padding around the middle. Cycling shouldn’t be any problem.

That's Ethan. He promised his wife he would start riding his bicycle regularly to try to get his blood sugar under control. He's talking to himself, and I hope he comes across as a man who thinks highly of himself, a man in denial. 

So those are some examples of using voice--using attitude--to bring characters to life. You may not like attitude coming from your kids or coworkers or customers, but you want it in the characters in your fiction. That's not to say characters have to be snarky, but from reading what they say or think, the reader should be able to find some adjective to describe the character in question, be it neurotic or mean or narcissistic or chipper or some other descriptive term. Your characters should feel like real three-dimensional human beings, emphasis on the word real.

Before I go, I had a guest cover my column three weeks ago, so this is my first chance to share here that my story “Real Courage” has been named a finalist for the Macavity Award. To those of you who received ballots, I would be honored if you'd give it a read and consider voting for it if you like it. You can find it on my website. Just click here.