Outlining
I see my story as a movie. That’ s just how my imagination works. I see scenes from camera angles and imagine the little black blips that pop up on the movie screen at the theater. And it always tends to be like a trailer from the beginning. You know what I mean, two minutes of the best scenes mashed together with big, bold words cut in between. You see a dozen of the movie’s best lines, three or four amazing actions scenes, all narrated by a gravelly voice.
I have always been a sucker for a good trailer.
And that’s how I see my story. I see all my favorite scenes, the ones that are the reason I’m writing the whole book to begin with, where the tension is at its height and the most memorable events happen. But a good story is an undulating wave of tension. It starts out at a low point and goes up and down, building toward the climax. Here’s a video by Extra Credits that really sums it up. They mainly deal with video game design but they have so many great things to say about storytelling that they’re worth checking out no matter your medium.
Back to my point. There is a ton of connective tissue that tie these major scenes together. The “slow” points, the ones you never daydream about, are where you build the significance of the high points. How many movies have you seen where everything that wasn’t in the trailer was boring, weak, or just downright bad? How many books and games have the same issue?
That is why outlining is so important to me. The first time the idea is on paper is the first time you see it without makeup. When an idea is in your head it’s under the best possible circumstances and you’re not seeing all the things that need to be there to make the scene possible. When it’s on paper you’re looking down at the bare bones of things and for the first time you are going to have to make them work together. There’s nothing worse than having to go back and erase things you spent days or weeks on because your story went in a different direction.
Don’t get me wrong, the outline shouldn’t be the final word on things. My wife (who looks great without makeup by the way) writes without an outline. It is amazing what she has accomplished in just a few months with just an idea, all the while maintaining a solid continuity. She wings it from beginning to end. And even with an outline, that will and should happen. There were and still are many plot points that come up or went away as I moved along.
The outline is like GPS. It shouldn’t tell you what lane to use or when to turn on your blinker. All it should do is serve as guide, let you know when to take a left and when to take a right. If you find a better path or find that one is no longer available, ignore it. It’ll freak the hell out and give you the “Make a legal u-turn” command, but as soon as it figures out what you’re doing it will do the “calculating” and a new one will pop up.
This isn’t to tell anyone they need to have an outline. As I said above, there are many who don’t. Some of my favorite authors don’t have outlines. I hope this helps anyone who is considering this technique. I would also be really interested in hearing what some other people’s method are for this.
It’s funny what can happen when you’re winging it. When I first started my second novel, I realized part of my outline just wasn’t working. Which is understandable, because this was a sort of Trekking part of the story, ping ponging from encounter after encounter, chasing a goal I hadn’t quite finalized yet. So back to the cork board.
Side note on that: I bought a cork board ten years ago and at this point (January) it was the first time I had ever used it for writing. I still have the novel’s outline up on the board, and it will be an essential tool for writing from now on.
Anyway, went back to it and moved things around. I still had this big patch of story where I didn’t really know what was going to happen. Something needed to be revealed and they needed a concrete heading, it needed to be cool, and somehow certain things needed to be tied together. A herd of centaur later (and a centaur shaman) and they were where I wanted them to be. Never intended it to happen and was just as surprised when they crested the hill as my characters were.
Also, one of them was a traitor but I hadn’t decided on which. When they finally did reveal themselves, it surprised me as much as everyone else.
So, when I hear people say they hate outlining because it stimmies the creative process, I don’t really buy that. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of people who don’t outline (Stephen King and my wife) but I need it. I’ve written half my first draft in right around a month because of this outline. It showed me where to put my feet. So far I’ve changed it, drastically, at least three times, and reorganized it several dozen. It helped bring an idea involving two or three scenes into thirty two thousand words of story, which will probably become closer to a hundred thousand words one the second draft.
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