The Writing Process Part 2, The Outline

This is the second in a series of posts about the writing process. These posts are not to be confused with fact, which would fall under non-fiction. Since it is very clearly understood that I almost never write non-fiction it shouldn’t be hard to correctly interpret this work.

When you have your idea for the story you’re about to write, it is now time for the outline.  Aren’t you glad there are so many steps between you and actually writing the story?

The outline is just a basic look at the story, its characters, what the plot’s about, maybe a chapter by chapter list. You do it so you can get the whole story down and know where you are going, and not get lost midway and wind up with a lot of plot-holes.  It is a snapshot of the whole world you are about to create.

It might go like:

Story: Web Log Midnight

Basic Idea: A man begins innocently down the road of blogging and slowly degenerates down into insanity. Hilarity and tragedy ensue.

Main Character: Chester Ellington, the hero and only character the readers ever meet, he is at the beginning a very normal and nice person with an amazing ability to write and at the end he is insane.

Chapter 1: He's calling his friend and saying he's starting a blog, his friend thinks he's insane.

Chapter 2: We read some of his blog. He usually writes about music or his life, job, friends, etc.

Chapter 3: He's missed some appointments and his friends haven't seen him for a bit, one calls and asks what's up. He says his attention has been on a lot of stuff going on in his life, plus this blog...

Chapter 4: We see more blog posts. The blog posts are getting better, he writes them with an intensity and dedicates a lot of time into each one. Also the posts are becoming more and more frequent, as he descends into the first bit of his madness.

Chapter 5: He breaks up with his girlfriend, a teary goodbye on both of their parts which is bitter and more than a bit ironic because it is done over the phone. Despite the fact that it's so teary he's being an asshole and doing it over the phone because of his preoccupation with writing, managing and promoting the blog.

Chapter 6: Now the insanity shows up in the blog itself a bit. He begins to write about blogs, as a blog is supposed to be about your life and his life is now almost completely blogging. He is making a lot of money doing this and decides to quit his job. He phones his boss and quits.

Chapter 7: Now he's blogging constantly. Hygiene, sleep and normal eating periods have been thrown out the window completely. He creates a website just so he can use it to direct more traffic to his blog. The only time he calls anyone is to order pizza or to tell everyone he knows about this blog.

Chapter 8: And, finally we have a strange shift of story. All of a sudden it's now through his friend Jason's viewpoint. He calls our main character Chester but gets no response. He's heading that way anyway and decides to drop by. He goes in with a spare key which is above the door and finds Chester dead at his computer, from a lack of food and sleep that finally did him in. End of story.

See, the best thing about an outline is it helps you clarify your story right from the get go. I actually had no idea what I was going to jot down for chapters 5 through 8, but as I went through the words came out.

So, a written outline can help you clarify the story, and it can also help you remember bits and pieces of it. You may forget how this or that part was supposed to go and, (refers back) aha! The cannibals were going to attack after the plane flies by without seeing our heroes, got it!

You don't have to stick to your outline 100%, actually you don't have to stick to any percentage of it. Orson Scott Card wrote the opening of Ender's Shadow four times before he found the right way to do it, scrapping the old and starting anew each time.* So you think the story should go in a different direction, so change the direction! Damn the outline, go ahead!

Now, I will leave you with one last thought, and that is this: you don't have to write an outline at all to write a story. Some people just don't, they prefer to figure it out as they write, and to write a bit and, hmmm, write some more, and well what if the earthquake happened just then, then write some more...you see they just roll with it. It's a matter of preference, do you like to have it all figured out or do you like to run with the story? That one's up to you.

Me you ask? I like both, I'll often write an outline but I also like just running with the story. I do a sort of hybrid of writing an outline and then generally disregarding it till the story is finished. Good fun, eh?

CME

Note: This post was written without the use of an outline. And now the author must retire due to unforeseen complications involving three cookies, loud speakers, a crash, and the number 6.

*http://hatrack.com/writingclass/lessons/1998-10-29.shtml

Comments

[Vixelgartner]

Hey there,
Not only is the citation for your reference to OSC's rewrites to be found here: http://hatrack.com/writingclass/lessons/1998-10-29.shtml
...you can also read each of the four versions!

Not that it has anything to do with outlines. In fact, they all follow the same outline; the difference is point of view. It's still true about scrapping outlines, though.

My favorite example:

'“Orders is Orders” was not quite a jell and you sensed it. I had a somewhat ordinary plot to begin and suddenly in a flash of revolt I tossed out my lovely heroine and made her a fan dancer out of anger for all lovely and impossible heroines. I threw away my dashing lieutenant and substituted a drunken top sergeant. I snatched up a Chinese missionary and wrote him as I knew him. I backslapped the Japanese for stopping me and almost jailing me once in Tsingtao. From a height of ideal formula, unable to control the impulse, I dragged the story into muck. And even then I checked that impulse. The result was, of course, mediocrity.'

http://literary.lronhubbard.org/page59.htm

Well, I've read the story, and it might have been mediocre for the market, but it was an excellent read.

Time to end this ramble.

[Chris Eberhard]

Hey! Yeah, I realized this one wasn't pertaining to outlines specifically, but the idea is you can scrap your ideas and go with something else, and actually at that point in the post I was talking about when you are underway writing something and you want to change it all, well don't let the fact that the outline has it differently stop your creativity, just run with the idea!

Thanks for the link and thanks for reading!