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Right over here (in the comments to the Livejournal version of this blog), Obadiah and I got to talking about something I'd been meaning to riff on a little bit, so here's an opportunity.
The question is about the value and importance of outlining (or at least advance planning) when writing fiction.
Those in favor of outlining feel it's too easy (without an outline) to meander around aimlessly, and follow digressions that seem appealing to the writer in some way. One minute you're writing a story about a character who was headed somewhere, and eventually you realize the guy has been pursuing something tangential for 1,200 words. Some of the words may have been fun to write, but in the best case you'll cut them (thus wasting a lot of work) and in the worst case you'll leave them in there because you love them (thus putting the reader to sleep for those 3-4 pages).
Those against, also known as "freestylers," argue that the fun in the creative process derives from exploration, and if you're following a pre-Mapquested route, it becomes boring and it's hard to get motivated to keep going. Also, some argue their subconscious will come up with interesting new twists they might never have discovered had they remained bound to an outline.
I used to be a freestyler, and now I'm an outliner. As I've mentioned numerous times before in this blog, my early writing involved too much wank. That is, I spent too much of my writing time just doing what felt good -- fun, banter-y dialogue, cool people, inventive locales. The problem is, the stories usually amounted to little more than mood pieces. They had no cumulative impact.
Writers who can sit down and freestyle, who intuitively spin compelling plots, and whose stories end up in a place that makes perfect sense once you look back at the setup and the character in the beginning, are lucky writers indeed. I don't doubt such creatures exist, but I ain't them.
In my opinion, the trick (which I'm still trying to perfect myself) is to outline and plan in advance just enough to keep the writer on track. I want to give myself just enough of a hint of a destination off on the horizon that I can make my way, not wander too far off course, and yet "freestyle" a bit en route. I love the little details of discovery a writer makes when they come to a "what next?" moment in the story, when the subconscious scrambles to fill in a blank and comes up with something much more compelling, on the fly, than anything that could've been outlined in advance of wading into the scene.
Another way of putting it would be, you should know some important things about your characters before you start, have a general idea of where the plot will end up, then let yourself freestyle from point to point until you get to that ending, and be as inventive and crazy as you can along the way. Pack in as many outside-the-lines details as you can, like a jazz improviser who can go wild even though he knows he has to join back up with the rest of the group after the solo.
Keep it fun, but don't waste time and effort going too far down blind alleys. Remember the need to make sense of it all by the end.
These are the tricks I'm working toward.
The question is about the value and importance of outlining (or at least advance planning) when writing fiction.
Those in favor of outlining feel it's too easy (without an outline) to meander around aimlessly, and follow digressions that seem appealing to the writer in some way. One minute you're writing a story about a character who was headed somewhere, and eventually you realize the guy has been pursuing something tangential for 1,200 words. Some of the words may have been fun to write, but in the best case you'll cut them (thus wasting a lot of work) and in the worst case you'll leave them in there because you love them (thus putting the reader to sleep for those 3-4 pages).
Those against, also known as "freestylers," argue that the fun in the creative process derives from exploration, and if you're following a pre-Mapquested route, it becomes boring and it's hard to get motivated to keep going. Also, some argue their subconscious will come up with interesting new twists they might never have discovered had they remained bound to an outline.
I used to be a freestyler, and now I'm an outliner. As I've mentioned numerous times before in this blog, my early writing involved too much wank. That is, I spent too much of my writing time just doing what felt good -- fun, banter-y dialogue, cool people, inventive locales. The problem is, the stories usually amounted to little more than mood pieces. They had no cumulative impact.
Writers who can sit down and freestyle, who intuitively spin compelling plots, and whose stories end up in a place that makes perfect sense once you look back at the setup and the character in the beginning, are lucky writers indeed. I don't doubt such creatures exist, but I ain't them.
In my opinion, the trick (which I'm still trying to perfect myself) is to outline and plan in advance just enough to keep the writer on track. I want to give myself just enough of a hint of a destination off on the horizon that I can make my way, not wander too far off course, and yet "freestyle" a bit en route. I love the little details of discovery a writer makes when they come to a "what next?" moment in the story, when the subconscious scrambles to fill in a blank and comes up with something much more compelling, on the fly, than anything that could've been outlined in advance of wading into the scene.
Another way of putting it would be, you should know some important things about your characters before you start, have a general idea of where the plot will end up, then let yourself freestyle from point to point until you get to that ending, and be as inventive and crazy as you can along the way. Pack in as many outside-the-lines details as you can, like a jazz improviser who can go wild even though he knows he has to join back up with the rest of the group after the solo.
Keep it fun, but don't waste time and effort going too far down blind alleys. Remember the need to make sense of it all by the end.
These are the tricks I'm working toward.
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-10 10:26 pm (UTC)From:On the Value of Not Knowing the Ending in Advance
Date: 2010-08-11 02:23 am (UTC)From:When I reach the climactic scene, I pretty much always find myself seeking a better, more original ending than the one I'd been, consciously or unconsciously, writing towards. If I find it, it's always something that was suggested by the beginning and middle (i.e., the promise I made to the reader, plus the development and expansion of that promise), but it's not what I thought would happen. In the best cases it feels right, but even I didn't see it coming. It's never an ending I could have thought of without first writing the entire rest of the story.
With the novel I'm planning out, I've decided I need something less than what would, for me, be a creativity-sapping outline, but more than my usual method of simply seeing what happens next combined with a vague sense of what that might be.
I'm wondering if maybe outlining, say, the first two-thirds of the book might be the best way to proceed. Or outlining the first third and, when I finish that, outlining the second third. Or doing the outline of the next three chapters only.
With endings, there's usually a potential happy ending and an unhappy ending, but the best one often lies somewhere in between. I'm hoping with outlining and free-form writing, there's also something better in between.
Re: On the Value of Not Knowing the Ending in Advance
Date: 2010-08-11 04:38 pm (UTC)From:Actually, it works OK to do it that way, basically postponing until the story is complete or almost complete before you realize what it's really about. Sometimes, you realize what it's about and that most of what you already drafted is outside those boundaries and must be discarded. That's a valid way to do it, and that's why I've often characterized myself as a twelve-to-twenty drafts kind of writer, but I'm trying to be more efficient.
I'm trying to work smarter, not harder.
I've started reading your Writers Weekend story, btw, but got interrupted about halfway through. I enjoy the scenario so far and it seems to be in the general territory of the kind of thing I like to write at times. I'll give you more specific feedback when I finish.
Endings
Date: 2010-08-11 05:48 pm (UTC)From:Coolio. I do have a good sense of where that draft's broken. Mostly, it's one where I didn't figure out a cool middle-road ending. That's why I submitted it for critique. (Well, that and the fact that it weighed in at less than 15 pages.) During the session we did some brainstorming about the ending at my request, so I now have IDEAS. :-)
I've made it as far as I have with the non-outlining model because I almost never have to throw away large chunks of my first draft. With my last couple of sales, I was lucky enough to finish the initial draft, look it over, and find to my delight that every scene did what it should, was situated where it should be, and started and stopped where it should. This meant I had only to polish individual sentences and paragraphs before sending them off. Each time it felt like a gift, but I know really it was just 'cause I've been practicing. (Cue: "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?")
By contrast, I've been needing to jettison large chunks of first-draft prose in my NaNoWriMo novel. I'm not sure if that's a result of trying the method on a novel-sized work, working so quickly (in that instance), or a combination of both. I'm guessing the last, but I'm also a more experienced writer now (it was nearly five years ago when I did NaNoWriMo, after all).
For me, plotting and structure came last, a long time after sentence and paragraph-level flow, characterization, and setting.
Re: Endings
Date: 2010-08-11 07:56 pm (UTC)From:Maybe part of my new comfort level with writing inside a pre-built structure is that I feel so comfortable working in Scrivener, writing these discrete, bite-sized chunks one at a time, rather than this very long, single document with only one "ending."
Scrivener.
Date: 2010-08-11 09:20 pm (UTC)From:The one thing people haven't been able to explain to me about it is how to get it to output standard MS format. I figure, since that's its whole purpose, it should be able to do that easily.
Re: Scrivener.
Date: 2010-08-11 09:31 pm (UTC)From:I always open the compiled draft in Word or Open Office before I send it off just to make sure the headers are right and that kind of thing.
Scrivener is definitely money well spent. You can download a 30 day demo.