With an outline in place, instead of spending time wondering what should happen next, you can put the effort into making sure what happens matters to the overall story, the events are important, and each scene is building toward the next. Many first drafts often read like “this happened, this happened, and then this happened,” but there’s no tension to make it into a story. It also helps maintain tension from scene to scene. A very basic outline-this is where the story opens, and why, here are a bunch of things that might happen in the middle, and then it all builds to this boiling point near the end, followed by loose ends getting tied up- keeps me on track. I need an idea of what I’m working towards, or else my characters wind up in Jimmy Buffet’s endless summer land, rolling through their days without much direction, and with overemphasis on events that turn out to mean almost nothing. The idea of overly plotting once gave me the heebie-jeebies. 2. Using an outline can be a gentle reminder of where you want the story to go. When I start a new project, I draw a calendar of the timeline so I know when key events happened, what day of the week the major holidays would be, and how many days would have to pass between events for them to make sense. Sometimes a basic timeline can act as an outline. Maybe you mentioned something was on Tuesday three chapters ago, but then the next week when you write another scene you say it’s the next day, and it’s Friday. Here’s why: 1. An outline gives you a reference to keep your timeline straight.ĭo you have chapters where the character wakes up, has breakfast, and then six paragraphs later is noticing that darkness is falling? What happened to the rest of the day? Or do you have a story that takes place over the course of a month, but then your characters are talking about weeks that have passed? It’s easy to get tripped up as you’re writing over the course of months as to when exactly things are happening. Now, one of the most frequent comments I have for my editorial clients is for them to go through the manuscript scene by scene and create an outline. Sadly this led to many failure to launch projects that never made it past 20 pages.
I, too, once loved to get to know my characters, throw them into an opening situation, and see where they take it without much thought other than a vague notion of how it will all play out. But to write an almost six-hundred-page novel to work towards one line, he would have to have some rough idea of how to get there. I imagine he enjoyed following the various directions the plot took, and jumped down many a rabbit hole with his characters. If you’ve read anything by John Irving, you know his stories tend to be long, with multiple tangents woven in. In John Irving’s novel A Widow for One Year, he said he wrote the entire story to work to the last line. But what happens from there? This is where pantsers (people who write without planning) will argue for letting scenes unfold, enjoying the magic as it flows from the keyboard. Writing projects also start with a spark-a character, a scene, a what-if moment. With most journeys, we start out with an idea of the destination.