My relationship with outlines has always been rather love/hate. I enjoy writing them because it’s neat to see the story unfold. But for the longest time I was convinced they would stifle my creativity.
Well, ten years and hard-drives full of incomplete stories later, I have to ask myself what’s going on. Why can’t I finish anything? Sometimes it’s a problem of motivation, but more often than not it’s that I just get stuck somewhere in the middle. I almost always know how I want a story to begin and how I want it to end, but getting between those two goal posts is the hard part.
And it is hard. If you’re putting love and care into your novel then guess what? It’s supposed to be hard. If you’re doing it right, it’s probably going to hurt a little. (That’s what she said joke not-withstanding) And I’ve realized – grudgingly – that this is what an outline does. It forces you to sit your butt down in a chair and plan out what’s going to happen to get your characters from point A to point B. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to ooze with genius symbolism or other such nonsense us writers think we’re positively brilliant for concocting on a whim.
Really, it just doesn’t happen that way. In no other artform does anyone expect a perfect rendition on a first pass. You don’t sculpt the minute details first, you lay out a slab of clay and mold it so that you have a guide for what you want to make. You don’t paint in the tiniest lines right off the bat, you layer down a background or a wash, usually after a loose sketch of some sort.
An outline is your loose sketch. It’s structural support. The foundation lent to this layered, complex building that will eventually become your novel. Without some sort of structure, it will fall one way or another. You may have the gusto to finish it while meandering along, and that’s great! But when you go back to edit the unruly beast, you’ll probably find yourself rewriting the majority of the book.
What’s less painful: A 1,000 word outline now, or a 100,000 word rewrite later?
That said, I am outlining for NaNo this year. I’m using the phase outline method, which so far has worked pretty well. I’m close to clearing 2,000 words in outline alone and I’m probably a quarter of the way through the plot. It’s getting harder, and I have to grit my teeth and slog through the middle sections, but that means less of a pause and certainly not a wall when I actually go to write.
So let’s hear it. Any other outline converts out there?
I used to outline religiously. I would plan out as many details as I could, chapters, plot points, etc., but I had the same problem: dozens of unfinished stories. A couple of years ago, I forced myself to write by the seat of my pants by just opening up a journal and writing an entire novel in longhand. I finished it! It was crap, but it was finished.
I’ve since modified my approach to blend being a pantser with being a bit of a planner. I’ll have ideas for plot points written down, but nothing too concrete, and I won’t put them into a set chapter-by-chapter outline. That way I’ll have major events planned, but they can happen when it seems natural for them to do so.
I’m a big proponent of doing whatever works for you. The main point is to have a finished, marketable novel, so it doesn’t really matter how you get there…as long as you do!