To outline or not to outline, that is the question

musingaloud asks:
Are you an outliner, or a non-outliner?

Yes.





If I have learned one thing in 20 years as a working writer (i.e. getting paid for what I write) and many more as a writer (i.e. one who writes), it’s that every writer’s process is unique. I distrust the idea that there is “an answer” or “one way” to do it “right” or do it “best.”

My advice on this score is simple: Figure out what works for you, and go with it. In general I believe that over time you, as a writer, will figure out general processes that work for you and specific processes that work for any given individual book. I don’t even write each book in exactly the same way, although the overall process remains pretty much the same, having been refined (or, if you will, ground down into well-worn ruts) over the years.

Do I outline or not outline?

I do both. Depending.

Or, if you want to be strict about definitions, I do neither. Depending.

Let me define (exaggeratedly) a strict outliner as someone who plots out, scene by scene, character development by character development, an entire novel before s/he writes it.

I definitely do not do that. Too much happens in “real-time” as I am writing. I have learned over time to trust the flow as much as the landmarks. I give in to that sense of trust as I write, knowing that things and bits and baubles will bubble out of my subconscious at unexpected times and emerge with or as cool stuff (at least I think it’s cool) that I *could not* have sat down and coldly come up with during a brainstorming or outlining session.

Also, I am dependent on the process of “organic writing” (the story and character development growing as the novel grows) for certain elements of my character interaction. I have had the experience of having characters suddenly say something I literally was not planning on them saying, things that took me by surprise; things that illuminated their characters in unexpected ways that only made their characters deeper or more realistic, more appalling or more appealing; things that, had I sat down and outlined and then written to the outline, would not have developed.

Do I think outlining kills spontaneity in writing? No, actually, I don’t. I think part of what goes on with outliners--so I suspect--is that they do a lot of head work in the outlining process that I prefer to do in the writing process. Ultimately, if the story comes out as richly as they want, then it doesn’t matter where that work happens.

Alternately, there is the strict non outliner, which I will define for my purposes as a writer who starts with nothing more than an image, a character, or an interaction and then writes forward discovering the story as s/he goes.

To say this way of writing would terrify me is an understatement. Dude, I am way too much of a control freak.

I think of myself as an architectural writer, mostly because I think it hip and cool to say so. And also because I like architecture, and because I studied music a little and the architecture of music often seems to me to have a lot to do with the way I plot, with the way themes and character affect and events and consequences ebb and flow, recede and heighten and recur, within the course of the story.

But what I would say that means is that I need a scaffolding. I need at the very least a foundation on which I’m building the story. I need a framework, and a way of thinking about the narrative (or melodic) flow of the plot. In the early and intermediate stages of thinking about the plot, specific scenes or events or reactions will pop into my head, and I’ll note them down. Later, as I’m actually writing the first draft, I will start cobbling together very ragged outlines for things that now necessarily come later; he’ll have to go *here* now because of what happened *there*; those two must have a conversation; she’ll sell that ring because it has bad associations. That outline may change in its contours, and sometimes long awaited events will transmogrify into unintended beasts, but in a sense I am writing to a fluid and malleable outline.

Tad Williams once called a process similar to this the “Hawaiian Islands” method: you know the peaks (the major events) that show above the sea, but all the stuff lying below the water you have to discover as you write. I like that metaphor, too.

That’s the long way of explaining why my answer to the question is “yes.” I do outline, where it helps me, but I also let the story unfold as I’m writing, where that works. Ultimately, I’m always balancing somewhere between the two.



So where does your process fall on the outlining/non-outlining axis?