Okay, let me start with a confession. I love outlines. But last week when I was writing about adding storylines, I ended up describing my process like this:
Adding an active character with her own supporting characters and story arc was an obvious solution . . . Once I had come up with the character herself, her supports and story quickly followed. Then I just had to take a look at my current scenes, add her into the relevant ones, and mix in some scenes of her own.
That doesn’t sound like someone devoted to their outline; the outline only shows up at the very end. Normally, once I have a story idea, I do outline it and make character profiles and generally know where the story is going — although I don’t usually know exactly how we’re getting there. My outline is the one document I always have open alongside the draft while I’m writing. But while I wrote last week’s post, I realized that sometimes outlining does me a disservice.
Why? Because a bullet-pointed, all-inclusive outline can feel too authoritative.
If the outline is the only document I have open while writing, I’m limited to what’s inside it. And while I do cram a lot in there — notes-to-self, story themes, scenes, chapter breaks, timeline — it can’t hold everything. Case in point: that character that I talked about adding in last week’s post? She didn’t come from the outline, and she didn’t come out of the ether, either. Actually, I got the idea for her from a different document entirely: a map. I sat down, mapped my town, and realized there was a blank space right next to my protagonist!
To put it clearly, I think the downfall of the outline is that it focuses on one kind of mostly-linear thinking. Sometimes, to see weaknesses in our story or things we’ve overlooked, we have to be able to see the project from another angle. Be it a map, a character board, another reader — the simple truth is that an outline can’t be the only authority.
No matter how much an outliner would like to think so. 🙂
