Outlining: the Devil is in the Details
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.
I came to the same conclusion not too long ago. I need a road map, but not a detailed one. Just the major highways and a town or two
What story are you working on?
And here’s where I flail and babble in a pitiful attempt to synopsize my WIP.
In a nutshell, it’s a fantasy about an assassin who finds himself possessed by a demon. Once I’ve got a clearer handle on it, I’ll probably devote a page to it.
I plot a lot, but find that my outlines never really fill out. Like running a D&D game, my characters are geniuses at finding their way around my obstacles. It’s maddening.
This is part of the reason I spend so much time doing full rewrites. It’s not because my writing isn’t good enough; it’s because the plot hasn’t entirely developed until a couple times through. My ‘outlines’ tend to be the stories I write for NaNoWriMo, half the length they should be and hackneyed. I started with a beginning, an end, a theme, a couple characters, and an idea for a really cool fight scene somewhere about the middle. It’s not to say that outlines are bad, really… I just can’t seem to stick to them.
I find that outlines are an extremely personal tool…no two writers seem to use them in the same way, if they use them at all.