It’s a universal question every writer has to ask himself or herself: do I need to write up an outline of the story I want to write? Outlining is essentially plotting, mapping out the story. Deciding what should happen in advance. What happens that the protagonist(s) must overcome, do they overcome it, what are the consequences? And so on.
Whether you write an outline or not, at minimum I think a writer needs to decide a few important things ahead of time, simply out of respect for a reader’s attention. If you have a lot of ground to cover over the course of the story, this helps you determine the space between each chapter or scene. Does the story span hours, days, weeks, months, years? With outlining comes a deliberate observance to pacing, so it’s sort of built in. What you get if you don’t do this right is a potentially evenly-paced book with a rushed ending. Even authors I greatly admire suffer from the rushed ending. I’ve been accused of that myself, and I don’t deny that it tends to happen. (I think I’ll save talk of pacing for another entry, though.)
Anyway, now that I’m writing something strictly on my own, should I try and outline the whole book?
If you write a book for some publishers, like Wizards of the Coast, you have to, no matter what. They want to know the basics of what happens, where the story goes, what characters show up, what monsters appear, and how the story ends. No big secrets. And when you’ve got a cap on how long your book can be, outlines help make sure you're on track the whole way through.
If I remember correctly, Stephen King (in his book On Writing) advises you to not think too much about outlines, but to just get to writing, to let it take you along for the ride (to discover it, he presumes), and worry later about fixing it up appropriately. R.A. Salvatore, I've heard from several interviews, puts together a superficial outline for his WotC books (again, because the contracts demand it) but then just makes it up as he goes anyway. Both are extremely successful authors. Can I afford to reject their patterns? Maybe not. But of course, they’re sort of anomalous in their respective genres. They’re not the everymen of fiction writing.
The truth is, I did find outlining to be extremely helpful when working on The Darkwood Mask and my second WotC book. In some ways, making an outline makes the story-writing itself less fun, because you feel constrained by it and you already know everything that happens. But at the same time, my favorite elements usually come up in the writing, not while creating the outline. As an example, the character of Aegis (a warforged bodyguard) never appeared in the initial synopsis nor in the outline for TDM. However, by the time I created him as a side character, he was absolutely necessary to the story and its conclusion, both as a character and a plot device.
I am at that stage where I’m beginning to outline, or at least write up a synopsis.
For you writer-types out there, what do you think of outlines? Are they for people who don’t know what they’re doing? Or necessary evils? Or something else?
Thanks for your insights, Jeff. I usually don't outline in detail if I'm just writing an article or short story (though I'm probably doing some outlining in my head as I go).
However, for longer projects I do tend to outline. This is usually out of necessity as a publisher wants to see the structure of a project before they offer a deal. But it also helps me get a broader vision of what I'm trying to do and what I would like readers to get out of a project.
For my current novel I am trying more of a journaling approach - jotting down notes and such as they come to me. Still, I have a general idea of the beginning, middle, and conclusion of the story. I don't want to outline it in too much detail because I'd like to leave some good amount of room for ideas to come and change the story for the better if they want to.
I prefer a general outline and look at it as a suggested template rather than a rigid one. If it needs to change and I have good reason(s) for doing so, then I'll change it.
I think there always needs to be some element of pre-story structure. If anything, it helps keep continuity. In the few stories I've written, I've tried to draw a sort of timeline/map of the whole story before writing it. It helps to make sure characters are where they're supposed to be when they're supposed to be there, and allows me to be somewhat realistic about how long it takes people to get places, and when important events occur.
That's not really an outline, per se, but it's something rough that helps the whole process along.
They're a necessary evil, at least for me.
If I write competely off the cuff, I find myself adding elements later on in the adventure/novel/whatever that either stray pretty far from my original ideas, or need to have some more backstory.
If I have an outline, I can still add in the new ideas, but the outline helps me to see the big picture, and where they may best fit in. If I don't have one, I tend to have a lot of messy rewrites on my hands.
My outlines are pretty rough anyway. They're more of a guideline as to where I need to go, rather than containing great detail. Rough outlines allow me to add in new characters and subplots without too much trouble. I just need to see how the rougher elements connect to one another.