Tag: Brandon Sanderson

Outlining sucks, but I should do it anyway

ReasonTaking a break from some short story writing today to talk about outlining. I’m a long time fan of pantsing it, but I’ve begun to think that maybe my support for making it up as I go isn’t for the right reasons. I’ve always found outlines difficult to write in advance, this sense that the outline is stifling my creativity, pinning me in. Like some prototypical hippie in a bad movie, I rebel against the conformity and structure that they impose.

Maybe the problem isn’t with outlining, though. Maybe, just maybe, the problem is with the stories I’m trying to write. Or rather, with the half-baked, incomplete ideas I’m trying to mould into a novel.

A typical scenario goes something like t his:

  • I have a harebrained moment of what seems like brilliance. Wouldn’t it be fun to write a book like X, with tons and tons of Y and Z?
  • I fire up scrivener, throw down a quick chapter/scene skeleton, and fill in a few synopsis for the first few scenes.
  • In my head, I hold this perfect image of the final product, pounding the keys until they begin to take that shape, like a sculptor finding the statue within the marble.
  • The steam peters out and I find myself flailing, usually around the 20-30k mark, though in a rare instance or two much further than that.
  • I toss the figurative coin – do I stop now, or just keep plowing through, because surely this story just needs me to be more dedicated?
  • Project dies.
  • Project is revived by me thinking, hey, I can finish that, I just needed a break! I review what was written, feeling excited by the prospect of closing the last page of the book. At this point, despite my seat-of-the-pants ways, I will insist that maybe if I just outline what I have, I’ll see where the problem is.
  • I spend some time creating a variety of outlines. Mindmaps. Index card piles. If in winter, there might even be a snowflake method invoked.
  • In frustration, I close it all and start something new until I can revisit it again in six months.

How typical is that? Far more than I care to admit. I think the only reason that my short stories don’t fall into the same traps is because, well, they’re short. Getting 1-10k words down is the easy part (never mind if the story is self consistent, non-meandering, or readable).

I’ve been quiet on here lately for two reasons. The first reason, the big reason, is that like any of us, I have a day job, and sometimes that eats more time than we like leaving us with precious little for anything else. The other reason, though, is because I’ve been working on an outline for a novel. It was working on this outline that I realized, luckily early on, that what I had again was a great set of ideas and events, but with no underlying story.

I think it should be a rule, from here on out, that before I can begin any attempt at writing a novel, I should start with the basics: an outline. It doesn’t have to be fully fleshed, but it does need to cover the story from beginning to end. Unless I can produce that, I can’t write the novel, simple as that. It means a lot more frustration as I play with ideas and then dismiss them, but I think the final output – a completed novel – will speak for itself.

Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn, Stormlight Archive, Wheel of Time conclusion) has started posting video captures of his writing a bridging chapter (non-main character doing something elsewhere in the story-verse to highlight or enlighten). I actually found most of it kind of boring and sped through it, but what I did take away from it was his technique for outlining. Sanderson is an admitted outliner, and he doesn’t show that in the video (at least not in part one, which is the part I saw here), but it’s obviously there, off camera. What we do see is Sanderson jotting down some notes for the chapter he’s writing, including fleshing out a brief outline (do x, then y, then z) at the bottom of the chapter to help keep track. And this sort of set off a lightbulb in my head about outlining.

  1. Outline the novel in general, broad strokes in one document.
  2. Outline the specifics of the chapter just before you write them.

It’s still outlining, but by saving the specifics until you are at the cusp of writing the chapter, it gives you some freedom to be creative and go down a random path. The risk of veering off in the wrong direction is contained to a single chapter (instead of realizing you need to chuck a good 10-20k), and so long as you keep the start and end points of the mini-outline in line with the larger picture, you aren’t likely to stray too much. I think the next time I sit down to write an outline, this is how I’m going to try it.

Now where did I put that random novel idea generator?

 

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