To Outline or Not to Outline, that is the Question . . .

A short treatise on writing strategies by Matthew Schocke

I’ve read a lot of biographical blurbs, listened to a lot of interviews, and attended a few workshops held by professional writers. I’ve also communicated with a number of unpublished writers. While there are a lot of common elements in how they approach their vocation, one thing that seems to vary the widest involves the degree of pre-structuring they do with their storytelling.

At one end of the spectrum you have writers who develop meticulous outlines, plotting out everything in extraordinary detail before they commit the first word to paper. Many times they become stalled out before they even begin.

At the other end, we have writers who pretty much make it up as they go along, angling for maximum spontaneity and hoping they don’t paint themselves into a corner. They can’t really tell you what kind of story they are writing until it’s done and they read it for themselves.

Granted, both of these extremes are just that – extremes. Most people have work habits that fit comfortably between the two. Furthermore, you can’t really claim that either way is more suitable for doing good work. There are too many examples of both types succeeding and failing to make it that simple. The trick is to figure out which way works best for you.

I’m going to cover some "best practices" used by myself and others, but no one has a handle on the absolute best way to do things. Try some out and see what works for you.

An easy parallel can be drawn between outlining and public speaking. Some speakers will approach the podium with their entire speech in hand, written out word for word. Others will, at most, have an index card with their major speaking points listed. Most professional speakers will work with minimal, or no notes, so as to sound as natural and conversational in their delivery as possible. On the other hand, if not having the full speech written out makes you so flustered you can’t speak, then a conversational delivery is the least of your worries.

One exercise to see where you might stand is to simply sit at your keyboard and try to ad-lib a conversation between two of your characters. If you can spout witty, or at least usable, dialogue on command, then it may not be quite as crucial for you to have every scene outlined ahead of time. The same thing can be tried with an action scene, though in my experience those can be a bit harder to do on the fly. If you found both of those exercises stressful, like you were being put on the spot, then a thorough outline will probably save you a lot of stress and effort.

An outline doesn’t have to be supremely elaborate either. It can be as simple as a theme, a list of plot points and a character directory – the bare bones that you weave your story around. You may find however, as you list the crucial sequence of events, that you are already working out how everything fits together, leading to greater and greater detail as you fit the pieces together.

The more I write, the more I find myself refining the way in which I develop each story. For the bigger projects, I’ll actually have the outline attached to the end of my manuscript for easy consultation. Mainly this takes the form of a list of major events in chronological order, though the detail in which they are described is extremely variable. As each point is covered in the story, I delete it from the slowly-shortening outline. I could do this with a separate document, but flipping between them is more of a distraction – your mileage may vary.

Like most people, inspiration doesn’t always strike me in a convenient or timely fashion. The first novel I wrote is a prime example of this. The first section was pretty well hashed out in 1990. I got a great new idea for the end (which completely changed the entire tone of the story) in 1994. The middle section wasn’t really completed until 2003. While I was still writing in a linear, first to last fashion, the climax of the story had already been thoroughly worked out in my head. The last twenty thousand words were written in little more than a day – to my vast relief.

What does this mean for me? I’ll often be struck with an idea of how to do a particular scene I have planned, well before I’ve reached that point in the actual writing. That’s where the remaining outline comes in handy. I type up a quick summary of the scene, or whatever aspects of it I got an idea for, and then insert it into the appropriate section of the outline. That way it is preserved for when I do get to that point in the story. If I try to just remember it, not only would I risk the details being lost, but worrying about forgetting it would detract from my focus on the current scene.

Having this partially-fleshed outline also makes foreshadowing easier for me to set up. The more you can make your readers go back and say “I should have seen that coming”, the better. And if you are like me, you will always come up with new complications and plot twists as you write the actual story. Sometimes these will be worth altering your outline to incorporate. Sometimes they should best be saved for another story. But I try to write everything down as it comes to me so I don’t lose it.

That seems to be a common theme in many of my writing practices. As my father would say “Don’t keep a dog and bark for yourself.” If you work on a computer, then use it to take some of the burden off of your own brain. That’s why I record any ideas that occur to me that aren’t going to be incorporated into the current scene – so I can stop thinking about them. Free up as much as you can of your short term memory and other mental resources so you can fully focus on the current scene. Anything that makes it easier to breathe life into your characters, anything that enhances the actual creative process, anything that makes it easier for you to get the words down, that is my definition of a "best practice."

Matthew Schocke is the author of the forthcoming The Deal and The Journey in the World of Dreams series.