The Imperfect Points of Outlines

Writing Tools

For discovery writers, outline can be a dirty word. For those who need a road map for their stories, outlining is as essential as breathing. Is there a right way to go about developing your story? No. There is only the way that suits you the best and allows you to express your ideas and meanings in the most efficient and effective way possible.

So, rather than pontificate on what everyone else should do, I’ll simply explain the reasons I like to outline and what I expect to get from the process.

The main reasons I outline are to: test the strength and power of an idea; to explore the meanings I find within that idea; and to devise a road map and blueprint, however rough that might be, of the series of events and characters that will, when woven together, illuminate the idea and the meaning through a tapestry of plot threads, evocative scenes and character arcs.

In practice, that means thinking about the characters, who they are and what drove them to this place, this starting point of story, and what events will take them, twist by turn, along their path to the point they can be left, older, wiser, happier or unhappier, but changed.

All events are inciting events. Every event will change the character, will force the issues, will crack the armour. However, each event must arise from the actions, reactions and consequences of the previous, each twist must be built on the foundations of the earlier impacts in order to make sense and feel true.

For example, because of this, that will happen, and to this character it is thus, but to that character it changes something entirely different.

Like a necklace, then, these events are connected, large and small, and will push and pull the characters along their route, each impact changing them more, driving them in a different direction with evolving goals, or finding their primary goal stripped of all pretence and delusion to a singular shining thing.

Sacrifices will be made, sometimes seemingly in vain. Victories might be hollow. Defeats might make them stronger and the whole may find itself greater than the sum of its parts as the lies are put aside and the true motives are laid bare. I like satisfying endings. I don’t mind if they’re happy or not happy, but they must answer the questions raised and deliver some meaning to feel satisfying.

What I want to see in a complex outline is the shape of the beast, the highs and lows, the triumph and despair. It needs to be knitted together with the plots of secondary characters and sometimes, of the greater world. There must be, in the aftermath, things to ponder, to wonder about. The more complex the story is, the more of a breakdown the outline might require — such as chapter by chapter, or scene by scene — and that is often to help me remember the goals and catalytic moments. Laying those out helps in the major structural analysis — does this story deliver the meaning I mean the reader to take away? That I cannot control what the reader takes away is ever present, but I can guide and nudge, can illustrate through the design of the story and its component elements.

Every story, long or short, complex or simple, should have some driving force for the writer, that which lingers in the mind and keeps the reader thinking on it. It might be the sweet, sweet taste of love, triumphing over all else. It might be a more abstract meaning, a question of morality or of society, or an examination of good and evil. When a writer has something to say, the story is strengthened, levelling up as the game-players refer to it. When the writer can deliver their meaning tightly and smoothly within their story structure, that story tends to remain in memory, prodding for some time. Designing your stories to have something to say and to say it subtly, through plot and character, through the interweaving of both, through the skilled use of description, dialogue and action, that is a worthy goal for any writer but one especially essential for the fiction writer.