That is the question you will hear from time to time from rookie writers. There are a lot of arguments for and some against outlining. There are people who swear that outlining kills the creative process. Some who, like me, swear by outlining. But I don’t think that’s the real question. The real question isn't whether or not to outline, it's how many times do you want to re-write something?
Me, I'm lazy. I want knock out a piece in as few drafts as possible. And since going to school to learn to write fiction, I haven’t written even a short story without an outline. I like outlines.
I know you’re thinking that the program I went through must have been big on outlines. Actually, it wasn’t. It was big on discovering your process, and building on what works for you. Outlines work. So, I outline a lot.
I start with a basic 4 beat outline (opening, turn point 1, point 2, close) and slowly build it out from there. By the time I'm done building from the initial idea I have at least a paragraph written for each chapter, and it’s anywhere from 8 to 10 pages long for a novel and 2 to 3 pages for a short story. I even outlined for this blog post.
By the time I actually sit down to write the story I know 90% of it. I know what the characters are going to do, how they’re going to do it, and what they’re going to say while they’re doing it. When it comes to the creative process all I’m just coloring in the lines with descriptive phrases and colorful turns of language. I’m usually pretty committed to the story when it gets to the writing part. The vast majority of my rewriting happens in the outline part. Surprise plot twists aren’t a surprise for me; they are built on and worked toward. My guns are well planted in the first act so they can go off in the third act. To borrow from Chekov. (I just made that line up now, it wasn’t in the original outline. See? Colorful language added during the writing process)
And having said all that this novel has presented a lot of challenges to my normal work flow.
As usual, I worked on the characters and the story via outline for weeks. Months, actually. I did my research. Knew what I wanted to accomplish in the story, and how I was going to do it.
And three chapters in, I was colossally bored with the whole thing. It was flat. Cliché. Crap. I was bored with the whole thing. An unusual experience for me. And if I was bored with the story, any reader certainly would be.
So, I stopped writing and went back to outline. What was the problem? Where had I gone wrong? I had been watching a lot of David Tennant’s Dr Who, and reading a lot of Doc Savage and Sherlock Holmes in preparation for this story. I wanted to be influenced by them in creating the protagonist. He was going to be a super-awesome scientist dude that saved the world.
Which, as it turned out, was the problem. He was great. Amazing, if I do say so myself. He always knew the right thing to do, right thing to say, or the right way to act. He dominated the story, which was good. A protagonist should be the star of their own story. But it was bad because nothing was really a challenge for him. He knew what to do at every point. It wasn’t a question of “will he survive?” but “how badly will the antagonist lose?”
And that’s boring.
So, how did I fix the problem? I don’t want to sound too arrogant, but the story beats were pretty good. The stakes were high. The goals were good. The antagonist was well defined, and wasn’t a cut-out bad guy. I had created a world built to challenge someone like Holmes, Savage, or Who but it wasn’t enough.
I fixed it by killing Mr. Super-Awesome in the first chapter, and replaced him with an imposter. So, now, there’s a perfectly ordinary guy who has to act like he’s the world’s foremost scientist, adventurer, and ladies’ man. And he’s got to survive in a world built to challenge Mr Super-Awesome.
And that’s a lot more interesting to me. Hopefully readers will find it interesting too.
So, what’s my point? I guess it’s that outlining does work. And it also doesn’t work. I only found out that my story was boring after I sat down to write it. Instead of plowing ahead with a novel I didn’t know anything about, I was able to stop and fix the issue early rather than being 20 chapters in and not being happy. Now I’m back on track, writing a story I’m interested in and find compelling.
