I’m still battling with the age-old writers’ conundrum regarding outlining and plotting. It could be that my resistance to outlining stems from quite a few years working as a tech writer.
I’ve written a hundred user manuals for numerous software programs and technical procedures, none of which I could have started or completed without an outline. During these decades, whenever I had time to write some fiction, I described the images, characters, and events occurring in my head. While acting as the steno for my active imagination, I reveled in the freedom of penning short stories without any constraints or outlines.
For decades I structured how-to instructions during the week contrasted with pantsing fictitious tales on the weekends. And this system worked as long as the fiction projects were short. I’ve successfully completed many flash and other short stories, mostly because the situation, predicament, characters, and world came to me ‘whole’ – I didn’t have to work at constructing the story. Granted, I’ve been known to put some of my stories through 20 revisions, but these revisions didn’t involve changing the original story structure.
However, pantsing has only taken me so far. In the last decade, I’ve started three novel-length projects that I cannot finish. They languish in a computer folder while I wonder what should happen next in these stories.
Last fall I finally retired from technical writing and instructional design, hoping I could finally concentrate on writing and publishing fiction. I still get ideas for stories ranging from 1,000 to 12,000 words in length, but in order to finish a novel, it appears I need to draft an outline.
Lately I’ve researched how other authors approach outlining their projects. Some authors claim they never start writing a story or novel without first penning an outline while others claim the opposite approach works well for them. These are some author opinions I’ve found:
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Dan Brown:
I don’t start writing until I have a very solid outline. Or else I’d get to the end and find out there is no ending, and that I just wasted three years of my life. The outline for The Da Vinci Code was a hundred pages.
Jeffery Deaver:
I plan all of my books very carefully. I spend about eight months outlining the story from start to finish before I write a single word of the prose, and I do the same thing for the arc of the entire series.
Stephen King:
Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses.
William Blundell:
I’m a strong opponent of outlining. It’s deciding in advance what the story will be, and then just bolting the whole thing together like something out of a hardware store. Tortured transitions are the mark of an outlined story.
Jack Dann:
For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I’m surprised where the journey takes me.
Douglas Adams:
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
Ray Bradbury:
Find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!
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First, I’ll start writing a Story Skeleton for my novel-length projects, which should prove a worthy first step toward drafting an outline. This is what Jim Butcher wrote about story skeletons:
Jim Butcher:
The story skeleton is a description of the main plot of your book, broken down into its simplest elements. It’s two sentences long. Your plot needs to fit into that framework. This is a fundamental description of the core conflict in your tale – and stories are all about conflict.
Moving along, I’ll finish reading Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell. His book has a section titled, “How to Energize a Lethargic Middle.” Nice.
And then I’ll jump into Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. It would be great to complete at least one of these novel-length projects before the holidays.
Write on!
