TECH: Outlining Your Novel (Part 1)

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original Posting June 18, 2016

I started reading an ebook with the title Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success by K. M. Weiland. I know it's available on Amazon. Anyway, these are some of my notes on reading through it. I'd be interested in whatever thoughts you might like to share.

Chapter one is Should you outline? Basically, K points out four major misconceptions that people often have about outlining that cause problems:

1. Outlines require formal formatting (and didn't we all hate those English teachers who insisted on 1a b etc, all properly indented and don't forget the punctuation?)
2. Outlines limit creativity (don't color outside the lines? Come on, it's your outline, you can modify it if you want to!)
3. Outlines ruin the joys of discovery (which is why no one uses maps and travel guides?)
4. Outlines take too much time (yeah, like writing the wrong thing and having to rewrite doesn't take any time at all?)

Then K goes into the benefits of outlining.
1. Ensure balance and cohesion (because you can see the whole picture before you dig into the details)
2. Prevents (well, helps avoid) dead-end ideas. Whack them while they are small, instead of spending a lot of time on them and then realizing it doesn't go anywhere!
3. Provide foreshadowing! Since you have a plan for the whole story, it's a whole lot easier to start foreshadowing earlier in your writing process.
4. Smoother pacing. Again, the broad view and plan ahead of time lets you do a better job of pacing.
5. Indicates the preferred POV. First person, third person, omniscient? Whose POV? It's hard to get right, but again, that overview can help you decide.
6. Maintain a consistent character voice. Since you have had a glimpse of the whole story, you can make that character more consistent.
7. Offers motivation and assurance. If you know what's going on across the story, it's a lot easier to keep the motivations straight, and you are more assured about what you are doing.

That's kind of a quick summary. The trick here, I think, is that if you are reading her book, you are probably interested in outlining and just need some support to try it. I doubt if hard seat-of-the-pants writers would even pick up the book, nor are they all that likely to be convinced by her arguments.

So... Next chapter is all about different styles or approaches to outlining. But I'll stop here for now.

Do you outline? Or discovery write? Oddly, the folks on Writing Excuses often say Dan is a discovery writer, but he's also explained the process of thought he goes through before writing, and it sure sounds kind of like outlining to me, even if he does it in his head instead of on paper. Brandon Sanderson used to claim he was a strict outliner, but then we found out he does three page outlines for 400,000 word books, and actually discovery writes his characters and other important parts of his stories. It seems as if the question might be how is your current writing process structured, and what frameworks or other methods do you use?

To outline or not to outline, was that the question?

tink