Saint Know-All

I’ve had a strenuous relationship with outlines, alternatively snubbing and singing their praises. Once I believed they snuffed out the creative spark in a story; this was when I tried to outline stories down to the tiniest detail. Then I believed the only way to coax coherency out of my writing was to harness it to a fully-realized (and written) plot; this was after I tried totally winging it and ran into dead end after dead end. Rewriting the same chapter four times to find the plot again is Not Fun. It’s like those Choose Your Own Adventure novels where you always made the wrong choice and ended up dying.

Now I consider myself a hybrid writer, working with the sketch of a plot and fleshing out the story as the characters develop. This results in a first draft really beng more of an outline, allowing for greater interaction and flow between character development and plot. Unfortunately it also renders the writing of a story as stable as a weathervane, at least until the initial draft is finished. Plotholes and writer’s block are much more likely to trip me up.

So I’m going out on a limb for the time being, fully outlining one of the stories I’m working on. My goal is to write the entire story arc while leaving enough room for character development to fill in the details. Flexibility is the key word here. If a character decides to do something that destroys a chunk of the original outline, then I’ll simply rewrite the outline before continuing. It almost seems too simple, yet it’s often the simplest things that I overlook.