I have tried to outline. It feels false in my head.

What is working better for me, so far, is to spend time writing the bones of the story in my head, maybe for days, maybe for months, and then start spewing it into Word. Sometimes it leads me to open doors I didn’t know were there, and when I do I think, “Oh! That’s where this is going. Alright, I can work with that.”

That actually happened last night. I groove on those moments.

This is all very new to me. It’s not dissimilar, though, to the way I write a blog post. There have been times where a post is born in my head with a very specific point or statement I want to make, and then after I hit publish I realize the sentence that started it all is nowhere in the post, and it’s a better post for it.

I’m a heretic of both churches.

I do both.

I lay out an outline. I know the points I need to hit. I have a vague idea of how to connect the dots, from A to B to C.

But the road between those points is unmapped. I let the story take me there. I hit a point, see the next, and sometimes I go there right away. Other times I digress, or develop, or just have fun. Sometimes it makes the final copy I revise. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Speaking of revision, where does that fall in the pursuit of the Almighty Word Count? I find that I’m subtracting far more than I’m adding from the manuscript. Should I already have fired up the second novel in my head? Or am I okay sticking with one arduous long-form project at a time?

@Josh –

For novels, you’d actually be a prophet in my church, all froth-mouthed at the pulpit: that’s pretty much exactly what I do. I hit the tentpoles (the “major landmarks”) then find the spaces in between naturally. My final product deviates quite a bit from the outline, but I do adjust as I go to keep it all straight in my head.

Re: revision, subtracting on the first run has always been my experience. Then, editors or agents may ask you to add — or, you may find cause for addition. But to me the first revisions are always about trimming the fat.

– c.

A few years back I attended a “writers” event where two plucky scribes chimed the glories of outlining. I was just getting back into the habit of writing myself and was eager to hear others sling out advice on the creative process. The two went so far as to say they both used PostIt™ notes on the wall to lay out all of their dialogue and action. All of it, each whole book on the wall before they even started to write word one. At first I was amused, but then I thought, huh. These two twits must be catastrophic cold lays and even worse cooks….I’m talking straight missionary and Kraft Dinner nightmares. Give me chaos. Give me organic. Give me Dada.

Hopping in here before I get to the Final Stretch of Packing-Fu for the weekend (mmm, coffee) –

Out of all seriousness, I agree with the sentiment put forth that You Do What Works For You. Every writer has to carve his own way through the jungle. Then, when he passes through it, it burns behind him. (Actually, each novel is like this: I’ve never approached each project with the precise same gameplan. Each demands its own attack vector.)

I’ve always made very clear here that the writing advice at this site is for me. It’s a selfish exploration of the lessons I’ve learned and need to reiterate to myself. Maybe it helps you. Maybe it doesn’t. You’ve got to choose the tools that go in your toolbox.

Here’s my only caveat, though:

I was once a gibbering proselyte of the Church of Anarchy. I hated outlining. Actually, still do. It felt false to me, too.

But I noticed one big thing with my writing: I had a hard time keeping focus. Plot lines in particular were a problem. I was good with character, dialogue, the Greater, Hazier Story — but plots? Plots failed me. I was constantly doubling back on myself and getting lost and this was a cause of great frustration. I’d sometimes get so frustrated that I’d stop before finishing. Or, I’d get a full draft done and see before me such a tremendous mess that I didn’t know what to do with it. I’d try to get back into it but I still didn’t have focus, still didn’t know what I should do.

Then came time where I wanted to finish Blackbirds, the novel that languished and kept stumbling about like a newborn foal. (I just found some old pages of earlier draft, and damn, they’re interesting — bad, but interesting.) I couldn’t get my head around it, and then came time that I got the mentorship with Stephen Susco and I decided to adapt Blackbirds to script format — and Susco wanted me to outline it first and I resisted and he basically told me, yes, but do it anyway. Stop whining. You don’t have to like it now, you’ll like it later.

So, I did.

And then I wrote the script.

And I liked it so much, I realize I had my novel all figured out — so, I rewrote it, and ta-da, representation.

Same thing happened with our film script, HiM, a film for which the response has been alarmingly good — we outlined. Very detailed outlines, well beyond the tentpoles. And it’s a painful process. It always is. But then, a miraculous thing happened when it came time to write: My usual three pages or so of script a day became ten, sometimes more. It was a great feeling — I’d already done a lot of the work, and so the writing became freeing, fun, and to my surprise, easy as hell.

I felt like I grew up at that point. My father was always trying to teach me a very important lesson, and that lesson was: sometimes, we have to do things we don’t like because it makes things better in the end.

And so, my devotion to the act of outlining was born. Outlining never feels right — it always feels like a PITA. But if my writing relied on my feelings at the time, I’d never get anything done. Often, feelings are false — a writer has to get past those.

The other thing is, when I read works that didn’t go through some kind of loose planning process, I can usually smell it. They feel unfocused, unresolved. It’s like the writer just wandered out into the desert with a blindfold on. Life has no focus and no plan, but stories do. Stories follow rules, patterns, tricks, turns. I like to have these in mind before I leave my house and walk the writer’s journey.

Or something like that.

– c.

(Oh, and lest I not say it: this is a great post and thanks to Dan for being first out of the gate and writing it!)

“A heretic in both churches.” I like that, because I fall a bit into the middle, too. Okay, I fall 99% in Dan’s camp, since my mis en place is a cup of coffee and a pile of scribbled notes on Post Its, gum wrappers, and old liquor store receipts. I always feel like I’m giving Chuck the cold shoulder, not commenting on his process posts, but there ain’t much for me to say. I don’t disagree with his process; it just don’t much work for me.

But I’ve always pictured our gracious host as more a tent revivalist, waving snakes around in a sharp white suit, than, you know, the Fuhrer. Take a few more good slips of that-there beard trimmer to pull off the Hitler stash.

Jesus, don’t you people ever sleep in? It’s Saturday for cryin’ out loud. And, as I think on it, Chuck’s little beard trimming “accident” may not have been. Strange, isn’t it, that, with his whisker powers suddenly at low ebb, he’s got guest bloggers lined up, like he KNEW he’d be down a few thousand chin volts and wouldn’t have the juice to pull the blog train betwixt boxing duties and truck stuffing? Almost like he planned it — dare I say OUTLINED it?

But thanks to check for letting me play with his toy for the day. And I don’t really think he’s Hitler, BTW. He’s a swell fella. Just he’s got his way and I got mine. That’s my only point. Everybody’s got a way. And you gotta find your own.

[...] amuses me when people talk of their One True Way, because I am more like Chuck Wendig (on whose blog this post started)–I have none. While that book had to be planned to get anywhere at all, [...]

It always amuses me when people talk of their One True Way, because I am more like Chuck–I have none. This book must be planned to get anywhere at all, that one will shrivel and die, staring with betrayed eyes as it does, if I so much as take out note cards near it.

You know what? This is a blog post.

http://www.sargemarcori.com/wordpress/archives/4295

[...] then you know I’m pretty famously against outlining. (Or famously against it when I argue with Chuck Wendig about it over on his blog, because he’s really is famous. He has more blog readers than the national debt has dollars. For [...]