Ah, the plotters vs pantsers debate. An old favorite among writers.
I hated outlines as a kid, writing papers for school. It always seemed stupid, to write the paper twice, and the outline never came out of my head in the right format anyway; I get that the teachers wanted to make sure I was doing the work and track my progress, but from the learner’s side, requiring formatted outlines that are suitable for public view is stupid. If you want someone to learn various forms of outlining, have them outline a book or paper someone else wrote.
But the propensity of schools to assign busywork that’s of little-to-no educational value is an entirely separate subject. Don’t get me started.
I’ve grown to appreciate outlines, plots, plans, and to-do lists of many kinds as I get older- and I can choose how to structure them, unlike school assignments- oops, there I go again! Knowing where you’re headed can be useful, and I find them most useful when I build in a bit of wiggle room and don’t get locked down too hard into thinking the final result is going to look exactly like the initial plan.
The beauty of a loose, flexible outline, or plan of any kind, is that it’s human. Nobody can think of every single contingency related to a project, and unexpected things will pop up as you go. Maybe you wrote a funny quip from one of your characters that, on second thought, actually hints at a dark backstory; if you’re a bit flexible, you can explore that. If you insist on rigidly adhering to the initial plan, there’s no space for a little side-jaunt into what the character really meant when they were trying to be funny. In a perfect world, you could slide that dark backstory in without disturbing the rest of the plan at all, but frankly, I’m not that skilled. I have to build in a certain amount of flexibility.
My methods of outlining vary, but one of the most common ones is to write a paragraph or so about the plot and setting, then each character gets a paragraph, describing their role and self. Sometimes they don’t even have names at the beginning, or their name changes; Kate Bereton of The Root of All Evil was always Kate, but her last name changed a few times before I settled on Bereton. And I didn’t know most of the plot when I started, either, just who was going to die and that she’d kept a secret for a very long time.
By contrast, Christmas at Blackheath was outlined mostly by chapters. I think I had a very short plot paragraph and a little character work ahead of time, then it was a beat-by-beat Christmas regency, a type that’s easy to outline in that manner.
Romance is one of the easiest genres to outline- see all the jokes about Hallmark movies that are all the same plot with slightly different window dressing. Fantasy also has a fairly standard set of beats that you can use if you want structure but you’re not sure where to start.
And there’s my old standby for other genres- make it up as you go. Results may vary; success not guaranteed.
One constant, for me, is that all of my outlines are typed. And I save everything. It sounds stodgy and boring, but I can add to them, change the names, cut and paste, etc. And if I lose the file, I’ve lost the whole thing, which sounds horrible but has one great upside- I’m not wondering whether one single index card went missing, or what the heck was on the whiteboard before someone accidentally brushed against it and erased half the outline.
How do you outline? Do you outline at all? What’s worked for you, and what’s been a dismal failure? Sing out, lades and gents, and tell me about your process.
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “Outlines”
I have a loose, 20,000 foot outline.
I know where I’m going, I know the major characters (most of them), and I know where I’ll end up.
Who I’ll meet on the way and incidents getting me to the finale are up in the air.
I’ve just started on another historical – and I’m using a sort-of outline, worked out on an excel spread sheet. It’s another wagon-train journey, in a year where I will have to make note of historical events happening … so I have a column for those events, and as the story progresses, I can work in references to those events.
I have a huge spreadsheet that I used for the Adelsverein series – and one of the things that I made note of as I went along was how old the various child characters were at various plot points.
Is Bereton maybe a nod to Clare Brereton of the unfinished Sanditon fragment?
For me, outlining varies. Marrying a Monster had a few core beats and characters, and was mostly a road trip about the heroine going home up-mountain for a boring traditional ceremony only to find out along the way that this year it wasn’t going to be boring. I didn’t necessarily have clear ideas of what was going to happen, but I put some thought into each of the towns she was visiting. (Basically this is a small scale version of the “follow the map, make up an adventure for each place” procedure you see in a lot of high fantasy). Saving a Queen was a bit similar, since the heroes are traveling upriver by balloon-boat, pursued by a demonic pterodactyl. Slaying a Tyrant was organized around a fighting tournament, so the schedule of who was fighting who when was important in outlining (so was the menu of what the heroine’s “demi-noble” family was serving all the fighters they were hosting).
Shadow Captain was a much more step by step kind of outline, and I think the pacing benefited from that. Most of my other books, including Wolf’s Trail, are more like: “Granted these characters, this setting and situation, and this desired endpoint and these expected checkpoints, what happens next?”
Character names…I usually don’t have them until things are starting to come together. I have a couple of plot bunnies based around the idea of giving (someone like) the dorky paper-pushing cuckold from End of the Affair a more interesting life and they’re both just labeled “(Concept) Henry Miles” in my notes. Shadow Captain was mostly dictated, and so everyone had mundane names (“dictation tags” like Adam, Helen, etc) until the rewriting/polishing phase. Loving a Deathseer was written before I had the Jaiya setting fully nailed down, so everyone was originally named using the Greek Name Generator at Seventh Sanctum and then I had to change them to match the other Jaiya books.
To get a story to start and get going all the way to the end, I need a Starting Scene Image, a Final Scene Image; a name (at least first name), appearance, and base personality of my protagonists; and a general “this is what the world looks like and how it works.”
Then I have… well, mostly a floating outline-as-I-go. Basically, “what are the next 3 scenes?” seems to be a good rule of thumb.
Outlining fiction for me fails hard. I think it is because I have to outline academic writing to make sure I’ve got all the points and citations that are required. Doing that with fiction falls apart, the characters and plot wander off in a different direction.
That said, at the end of each section I have a rough list of “what’s happening next, where eventually this ought to end up, perhaps.”
Sometimes I do a list of scenes. This is my way of forcing the story to prove to me that it will end rather than peter out.
Sometimes I use a plot structure because the middle of the story is weak and I know I need to force it have at least one turning point that matches the intensity of the climax and the inciting incident rather than just be one thing after another.