Outlines as Temporarily Embarrassed Drafts

I suppose that this is a reader response blog now. As has happened not once, but twice before, someone on discord asked me how to write and I spilled a bottle of ink explaining.

This time, a friend asked:

help?
how does one plot a story (or even start)

Now, I have technically written on this topic before, so long time readers of this blog will find this familiar.

Still, "Ur-Development", in addition to being a pretty bad essay by my new standards, only articulated a theory --- not an explanation. It wasn't a tutorial, and anyone sent to that post for guidance will come away with only a vague understanding of what to do next, if ideally a bit more general understanding (in practice, they'd probably just be confused).

So that's what this follow up is for. Let's put that theory into practice.

Introduction

If you've read any amount of modern writing instruction, you could write this next paragraph yourself, but I feel compelled to add it, if only as ritual.

In the rest of this article, I'm going to make several definite assertions about how best to write and what you want to be doing. I'll only disclaim here: this is my process, not law, so pick out whatever sounds helpful to you.

And for stuff that doesn't sound as helpful, it might not work for you --- but it still may well be worth trying anyway, just to gather data, since what I do clearly can work, for some value of "work".

With that out of the way, I think the first thing to keep in mind when outlining is that outlining is a form of storytelling. And for our purposes, a telling of a story can be three things: shortened, precise, coherent --- pick two.

To be useful as an outline, though, it must be shortened. Thus, everything in your notes exists by virtue of existing either as unworkably vague summation, or as little acontextual fragments of potentially usable prose.

Call these ideas and details. The first thing I'll tell you is that you'll want to have a place to put both; they're both a part of the process.

The second thing to always keep in mind is you don't want to be outlining. Your goal here isn't to produce a finished outline --- I never have. I finish writing arcs before I finish outlining them. The only rule of writing is tell your story, and you only need enough outline to accomplish that. Or, to play mad libs with a quote:

The primary thing when you take a pen in your hands is your intention to write the story, whatever the means. Whenever you outline, brainstorm, summarize, throw away vomit drafts or pin string to photos on a corkboard, you must write your story in the same movement.

Miyamoto Musashi (not really)

Put more soberly, it's worth elaborating that outlining can solve three problems, mainly:

1. "But I have no idea what to write."
2. "But I don't know if my ideas will hold up."
3. "But I don't know what I'll need later."

In some ways these are expressions of the same problem, but to illustrate each, say you wanted to tell the story of a sad swordswoman who goes to slay the ghost queen who haunts the moon.

Problem type 1 is writing a few chapters then realizing:

okay, but how even does my wandering swordswoman get from wandering in bumbledum nowhere to being anywhere near the moon ghost?

Problem type 2 would be writing out the story, and then as you get near the grand confrontation you realize:

wait, why does she even want to slay the moon queen?

Problem type 3 is getting the scene where she ascends from the earth to the moon via a ritual teleportation circle and realizing:

fuck, it sure would be nice if i had ever mentioned ritual circles existed anytime before now. without that, this is kinda cheap

In sum, you might outline:

• So that you even have a story to tell.
• So that your story doesn't fall apart as you're telling it.
• So that your story is a bit more polished.

And it's important to be aware of what problem you're specifically trying solve when you outline.

For example, a problem of type 3 (what if I need setup later?) is a bit less important (or at least different in form) if you're writing fanfiction, where you have plenty of characters and worldbuilding and plot points to draw upon whenever you need, and the general space of what can be done is established.

Problems of type 2 (what if plot holes?) aren't important if you're writing a simple story where this problem is unlikely --- after all, it's much more likely a murder mystery falls apart than a slice of life story.

And problems of type 1 are less of an issue in episodic stories, or stories where the logistics of "how do I even get from A to B" aren't as daunting in scope due to genre or plot/setting. Contrast a continent-spanning fantasy adventure to a superhero story set in one city.

You could be skeptical of this focus on specific problems, of saying essentially, it's okay to have no idea what you're writing if you think you can get away with it. Some, I'm sure, accept the dichotomy between planners and "pantsers", architects and gardeners, narrativists and simulationists, or however many other ways you can express this genre of distinction.

But still, isn't it always better to do more planning, if you can? Sure, some people lose motivation to work on their story if they plan too much, or feel they can't faithfully write their characters if they know what's going to happen.

But, and forgive the rudeness, is this not a skill issue? Maybe some people aren't cut out for planning, but this isn't an argument that planning isn't strictly better.

As a certain writing youtuber asks: can gardeners do anything that architects can't? To quote from a comment I left on that video:

Fundamentally, the limitation on every outline is that the map is not the territory. You can have detailed plan, but the story you're writing can't be fully characterized by the plan, or that plan would be the story (anything else you'd add is by definition unnecessary).

There must be details you haven't worked out, and those details, some of them, must be crucially important, or there's no need to go into detail. There will be turning points, critical moments, where a single gesture from a character or the phrasing of a short line of dialogue could shape scenes or entire arcs. (All for want of a nail, you've heard it before.)

So it's entirely possible that, after planning out the entire alphabet, you get into the weeds and find that the path from A to B or J to K isn't as smooth as you'd want it to be. Most of the time, it's well within your abilities as a writer to course correct, tweak a few things so that the path from there is at least as smooth as you could make.

However, if you had been gardening, would those weeds have been so troubling? Without an outline, when just improvising, you can simply go in the most natural seeming direction right away, rather than having to twist and contort paths so that they bend towards the destination you already have in mind.

If the benefits of outlining is consistency and purpose, then the benefits of improvised writing is flow, and that's what draws us into a story and keeps us enthralled in the first place. Outlines are global, but stories are read locally. Ultimately, the thing outlines get you is avoiding the possibility that down the line, there's something you'll think of later that you wish you thought of earlier.

And the thing not outlining gets you is kind of identical, isn't it? When you're in the guts of a scene, feeling your characters' minds vividly and able to clearly see the layout of the room in your mind, when the vibes are firing on all cylinders, you just might think of something that makes a lot more sense, that you'll wish you thought when you were planning this all out, but there's too much planning you can't scrap now.

You might think this is an overall lesser concern --- after all, in the worst case, if the thing you thought is so compelling, you can just change your outline, and that's certainly less work that having to rewrite the whole story because you improvised your way into a plot hole.

But I'm not sure it's so simple. How much of what you've written until now has been invested in setting up things later in the outline? How pointless will it be if you can't follow through on the promises you were making, just because a better idea occurred to you?

I'm not the biggest fan of just blithely going "both sides are the same, everything is perfectly balanced and nothing is better than anything else", but I think it's entirely possible to outline your way into plotholes, albeit of different type (and perhaps overall lesser in quantity and severity?) than the ones you might improvise your way into.

And you need to be aware of that. Don't outline because you think stories should be outlined, outline to solve problems. With every pen stroke, you must write your story.

But this is all preface, isn't it? You've scrolled one third down the page and I haven't even started talking about how to outline

(Still, I think understanding the "why" solves much of the problem of "how".)

Suffice it all to say, then, if you want to outline, your first step should be to ask yourself:

• Where is this story going? Can I imagine the broad strokes from start to finish with no blank spots? Try writing this out; if you only think inside your head, your brain can trick you into thinking your ideas are clearer than they really are.
• Does it make sense? Can I explain the reasons and justify the events of this story with no glaring logical errors? Consider discussing the trickier bits of plot with a friend, and seeing how another perspective tries to solve the problem, or evaluates your solution.

And you might be expecting a third question here, but there isn't really a test for the last issue. Problems of type 3 are purely polish and foresight.^And, of course, [pacing.] More setup is usually better, but it isn't always necessary, and if it is necessary, it means the