I wasn’t much of an outliner in school. Any required outlines were made after the paper was written. It felt a lot like “showing your work” in math – something else I wasn’t a big fan of. I never understood why the right answer wasn’t enough for them.
Working on projects longer than three pages, and multiple projects at a time, I find outlines indispensable and I go through many of them before I start on a title now.
My first outline is very broad. I know where I want things to start. I kind of know how I want things to end. In the middle, there are usually several scenes I want to have play out. That’s it. Very broad indeed.
The second outline fills in the spaces between the scenes. It connects everything and usually helps strengthen the ending of the story. After this outline, almost all of my chapters are defined.
The third outline fills in the detail of each chapter. Again it’s very loose. I’ll list out what needs to be accomplished in each chapter to keep the story and characters developing and the story moving forward. I’ll also include any ideas for dialogue that I may want to play with and, since I write comedic books, any jokes that might arise from the situation.
By the end of this outline, the ending of the story is all but decided.
Then I start writing.
I used to fear an outline robbing me of any creativity. But with this method I’m still free to play around. If things change for the better it can always be altered.
I’m a huge fan of This Is Spinal Tap because it’s awesome and you should be too. This is pretty much how that masterpiece came together. A list of scenes and what needed to be conveyed. Everything else was improvised and it really worked for them.
I no longer fear the outline. I live by them. And they’ve made my work much, much stronger.
To outline or not to outline, that is the question. This is one of the best, brief outlines of how to outline I’ve seen. I’m still not convinced for one reason. I get excited about scenes. The anticipation of writing up to them is what carries me through. If all the scenes are outlined I think there will be too much filler. Also, I’m character led and my characters tell me where they want to go. I often have no idea where my book will end until I get there and a lot of the twists and turns are surprises too.
I agree. What’s nice about this type of outline is it doesn’t stop the story from surprising me.
This is more or less the way I do it, too. I also used to hate outlines, but I started doing them because usually a story will pop into my head almost fully-formed and I have to write down a synopsis before I forget it. Then I just keep filling it out until all that’s left to do is add details and dialogue. But like you said, there’s still plenty of room for the story to surprise you.