I got really sick, semi-recently. The writing essentially stopped shortly before the sick, which is a good indicator that I messed something up. While spending a weekend having a bad but not life-threatening asthmatic reaction to a hotel, I took a workshop, and used my stuck WIP as the example. It was a great workshop, taught me a few new tools and helped me see how to unstick the WIP, and plot it out to the end.
Then I got really sick, which is kind of inevitable when being around a crowds of people for a few days while my immune system was busy attacking me instead of fending off invaders. The writing stopped until I got better. But! I have an outline full of beat by beat, everything I need to do!
Then I got better, and writing was still like pulling teeth. I figured I just needed to prime the pump and get into the habit again. Except it wasn’t working.
So I tried self-care and rest.
It worked… enough to realize that my brain was going “You finished the story. You know where it’s going, and how it got there. There’s nothing left but editing, and I hate editing.” Except I hadn’t, y’know, finished the story. Only the outline. And I can’t edit a blank page. Le sigh.
Today, I finally got words moving again… by changing what happens from the outline.
Okay, I may be a fan of having a few story points ahead to map out where I’m going, but clearly full outlines are not going to work. Not yet, anyway. These things can always change, from story to story.
Where are you currently at on the pantsing (discovery) to plotting spread?
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “To out line or not to outline”
I’m totally pantsing.
My back brain likes it, but I’m not at all sure it produces a satisfying plot. It’s getting close to “slice of life” ish. It’s certainly a simple plot, and produces a pretty short work.
I’m trying to figure out how to complicate the middle part and add some series-wide progress on my fallen empire rebuilding into something less brutal.
But I’m with you, and I think Cedar mentioned the problem as well, with an outline that satisfies the backbrain’s need for a resolution of the story . . . the afore mentioned brain is happy and does want to go back and fill in.
I’ve never 100% pantsed anything worth publishing, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that people who can do that tend to develop intensely vivid settings or characters who dictate the course of the novel.
When I start, I generally have some idea of the novel’s end-state, and a few key pieces thought out. In my pre-Scrivener, pre-notebook-collecting days, this would take the shape of a thousandish-word summary in red text in word, and I would write the novel in black text ahead of the red text, deleting the red text when I’d covered that part of the text. There’s usually still a lot to be discovered along the way, and currently the thought process for the discovery part tends to be corraled in notebooks for me.
I’ve known people whose outlines were beat by beat zero-drafts typed up in their word processors, and from there would gradually edit/expand each scene in turn, but I struggle enough with the editing/expansion phase of writing to where I try not to make it worse. Chris Fox’s “Plot Gardening” book is probably the closest thing to my own method I’ve seen in how-to books.
I’m reading History of the Lord of the Rings right now. Tolkien is usually described as a discovery writer, and the people who say that are not wrong, but there was only a comparatively short period at the start of a very long writing process where there was any risk of it turning into the Hobbit Barchester Chronicles.(1) After faffing around with hobbit genealogies and drafts of the first chapter for a time, he decided (paraphrasing): “Gollum’s/Bilbo’s ring=evil/untrustworthy” and sometime after that: “Ring must be destroyed, probably in fiery volcanic feature.” Everything else followed from that, and although a lot of stuff surprised him in the writing process (eg, Chaotic Evil giant Treebeard becoming Chaotic Good tree-shepherd Treebeard) he would stop every couple chapters to summarize what he thought was going to happen later on in the plot.
(1) If anyone feels like writing the Halfling Barchester Chronicles, or even ordinary Shire fanfic, I encourage you to check out Return of the Shadow for many examples of Tolkien’s wacky Hobbit naming conventions, to supplement the ones in the ROTK appendices.
60/40 pants to plot. I set out what I need to cover in the near future chapters, and roughly where the story has to go, but then? I just go with the flow, and go back and correct/add/clarify as needed.
I pants outlines.
I have a pile of notes, and also have taken in doing them with areas marked “stuff” so I can get the timeline correct even before I fill in the gaps.
Every now and again, I pull out a plot skeleton, when I feel something missing. Generally poking things to get major events in the middle instead of just one thing after another. (My latest outline really needs villainous actions to push back, I realize.)
It can turn out to flawed in parts, sometimes requiring me to reroute the story in the first draft, and sprouting subplots is commonplace.
I write things out of order. I get scenes, sometimes whole chapters, that are a long way from what I’m working on. The first story I wrote, I had chapters 7, 9, 11 and 12 written before I finished struggling with chapter 5. Just had to make a few changes when it was finally time to add them. All the stories I’m working on now have partial scenes that belong half a dozen chapters or more beyond what I’ve got finished.
They’re like trail markers, showing where the story needs to go. I just have to hack through the underbrush in the right general direction until the story reaches them. And watch out for false trails.