Outline. Yes or No?

I was educated by an order of St. Joseph nuns who demanded outlines – those bewildering subsets of bulleted letters and numbers – for term papers. The concept of outlining was similar in my mind to looking up a word in the dictionary I didn’t know how to spell. How could I outline when I didn’t know the topic? So after I completed the assignment, I did the outline. Of course, the outline was supposed to be done before the report. But what was the point? I still had to write the darn thing. Anyway, I didn’t come easily or willingly to the planning concept. No, that took me years of aimless writing.

My first manuscript was written after reading: See the scene as if it’s on stage, watch what happens, then write it down. Brilliant, I could do that. And I did. However, the end result was a meandering of the worst kind – backstory with no forward movement. So where did I go wrong? Metaphorically speaking, I built a house without a blueprint.

“A blueprint? For a story?” you say. “But that’s so contrived. What about the unpredictability of the characters? What about their freedom to express themselves untethered? Besides, if you know the whole story, you’ll give too much away. A story isn’t a term paper. It’s creative.”

Yes, precisely; fiction is creative. Even more, it’s boundless, it’s imaginative, it’s where pumpkins turn into carriages. And it’s exactly for these reasons that a general framework is needed. Stories do take on a life of their own. They can spiral out of control or drop like stones. Every innocent line of dialogue, narration, exposition, and description has the potential to draw the story off point. Sometimes you won’t even realize it until you’re pages ahead, pulling out your hair, wondering how events got so tangled, so lost.

I spent two years rewriting my first manuscript. Actually, I spent two years rewriting the first chapter of my first manuscript. Yes, I said first chapter, two years. That’s about as brainless as one can get. Naturally, during that time, I had some serious questions about my sanity and ability to write. For some reason, the thought of planning the story never entered my consciousness. No, that came later, much later.

Eventually, I took on another story. This second manuscript had forward movement, but ran out of steam at page sixty. I had the general sense of where I was headed, but for some reason stopped cold. Ditto for two subsequent manuscripts. It wasn’t until I was asked by a member in a writer’s group to give him an idea of where the plot was going that I decided to put a brief narrative down on paper. Suddenly, the clouds cracked apart and I understood what the nuns were asking.

Writers do a lot of thinking. In fact, we do more thinking than writing. Thoughts are lightning speed, transitory, winsome. And it is from these wild synaptic pulses that writers attempt to fashion a comprehensible story. Writing fiction is also a creative process of honing, shaving, twisting and turning ideas. It’s first brainstorming, then funneling down. It’s evaluating and deciding. Fiction breathes, grows, and mutates before becoming a finished story. In the process, some sorting out needs to happen.

And so goes my vote. Outline? Yes

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