Introduction

Do you know what I often see when a writer asks "How do I outline?" in writing forums? People not contributing to answering the question, shutting it down and derailing it by saying "I'm a pantser," "Don't outline," or "Outlining ruins the fun for me," and spreading all sorts of excuses and myths as to why they don't outline.

It has been almost ten years since I last wrote any sort of fiction, but, during those ten years, I never stopped working on them. I can make all kinds of excuses as to why I haven't touched any of my fan fiction that people loved and dearly wanted me to continue; I moved out of state, I accidentally left my notes, I lost traction, I've gone through multiple jobs, and the list can go on, but what it came down to was, somewhere along the way, I lost motivation because I didn't like what I was writing. Well, it wasn't so much that I didn't enjoy the ideas I was writing with, it was more of how I was writing them.

Ten years ago, I was pretty much a pantser with the most basic list of ideas I wanted to write in the story, that I scrambled to write from one idea to the next. Back then, I wasn't concerned with structure, and my character development was sporadic and shallow. Though my writing was legible, I was hardly concerned with spelling and grammar, so it wasn't nearly as edited or polished as it could have been. I frequently had to go back to previous chapters that I had already posted online to retcon new ideas, which ended up making my readers confused and irritated having to go back to read previous chapters. Lastly, my main concern was putting my ideas out into the world than actually finishing the story, so even with the stories I was really passionate about and wanted to complete it, I ended up moving onto other ideas.

That's not true! You've finished some stories.

The few stories I did complete were all story requests from way back in the days of Penny the Pencil Monster, and they were fun, silly, little stories with low stakes that I pumped out in a few afternoons. "What is Perfection?" started off as a Yu Yu Hakusho one-shot that I expanded to a longer story, and while "Cheater!" (for Ouran High School Host Club) stayed a one-shot, I always wanted to make these two stories a trilogy, but I never got around to the sequels.

My writing track-record, to say the least, is abysmal, but I want to change that by going back to my older stories and "remastering" them so I can have something I'm actually proud of, starting with completing their outlines. I finished outlining part 1 of Sequestered Mind (for Storm Hawks), and writing the first draft had been a breeze in comparison, which got me thinking about pantsers and the prevailing myths some perpetuate that outlines ruin stories for writers. Each writer has their own way of doing things, whether they really are pantsers, plotters, or somewhere in between, so I'm not here to convince you to be plotters if that's just not how you operate, but I do want to encourage you to dip your toes in and give it a try if what you've heard about outlines has been holding you back from even considering it.

This also isn't to say plotting and outlining will fix everything.

Tolkien is a phenomenal world-builder, and a meticulous plotter, with unbound creativity, but while there's that meme exaggerated that Tolkien could write three pages on a single tree, I can believe he would do that and not be sorry about it. I'll stand my ground when I say I think we honestly did not need to know every little detail about hobbit history and lore right at the beginning of the Lord of the Rings series. That could have been condensed and then the rest of it could have been sprinkled throughout the rest of the books. You could say that Tolkien's creativity could have benefited from being pruned. If only he listened to his editors. . . .

However, I am saying outlining can help mitigate problem areas and solidify your understanding of story structure until you're more comfortable pantsing larger, higher-stakes, novels.

Even Stephen King could benefit from an outline, but instead of outlining the entire story, he could think of several endings as he continued to raise the stakes to a degree he couldn't write himself out of. His stories are full of grit and character, and I love how he builds the scenery and tension, but it seems in his novels, particularly after The Green Mile, he just builds and builds, and continues to raise the stakes, makes the monsters more and more impenetrable, that on the very last page he decides that he's sick of writing the story, writes a last page of who-fuckin'-cares-anymore and chucks the book out of the window where his publishers catch it and publishes it because the book will sell as long as his name is printed on the cover. I don't need a happy, sad, or a bittersweet ending, or even a definitive close. Open endings can be the best part of the book! But, I don't find King's endings satisfactory. Sorry, not sorry.

Here are some of the "myths" die-hard pantsers love to spread.

It's Just a First Draft. I'll Revise and Edit it Anyway.

Your first draft is a gigantic, super detailed, outline that I'm willing to bet took you forever to write because you didn't know where your story was going or how to get to the next idea you had, and you probably had to continuously comb through your document to find some detail because you forgot how you described it earlier, gave up, and made something up on the spot that you said you'd change it when you find the detail you were originally looking for, and then forgot all about it. When you finally finish your first draft--if you get this far--and it's time to revise and edit it--if you choose to--it'll probably be another round of hell because you realized you accidentally left some massive plot holes run loose so you're going to have to figure out how to fill it, a character's eyes suddenly changed from green to brown somewhere and you might have even said they were blue once, and some important character or object just somehow became so unimportant that they just disappeared for some reason.

I Can Never Finish My Outline

Guess what? You don't have to!

You can try plantsing by outlining a portion of the story, writing the story, and go back to outlining, or don't. You can use an outline to settle on the larger picture and get a solid foundation of your story, and then build on that foundation as you write the story. As you're writing the story, you can add onto your outline so that you can stay consistent with character details or other important notes so you can quickly reference back to it when you need to as you write the story.

Outlines aren't just great for prep work for before you write your story, it's also great to add onto as you write your story, treating it more as a reference guide.

It's Boring!

There are hundreds of ways to outline a story, and I highly doubt not one of them would work for you. If you try a few different methods, you may find something that stimulates you. You may even use different outlining techniques depending on which story you work on.

I Won't Feel Like Writing the Story

Chuck Wendig said,

"The myth isn't about the magic; the myth is that the magic is so fickle that something so instrumental as an outline will somehow diminish it. If after outlining a story you think the thunder has been stolen and you don't want to write it anymore, that's a problem with you or your story, not with the loss of its presumed magic. An outline can never detail everything. It'll never excise the magic of all the things that go into the actual day-to-day writing. If that magic is gone, either your story didn't have it in the first place, or you're looking for excuses not to write the thing."

An outline is never a story. A list of scenes and what happens in them is never as impactful to you writing it, or to the reader as the story. An outline is not a finished product.

And if it feels like a giant rewrite, then you'd hate the revision and editing step even more.

There's No Room For Exploration

You are not beholden to your outline. If you got an idea that you want to try, you can write it out to see if you like it, and you can go back to your outline to make any necessary changes. Outlining shouldn't stifle creativity, no matter how detailed your outline happens to be. It's OK to stray away from the outline, I promise.

In fact, I'm going to show you the different options and methods you can use, and then I'll show you the step-by-step process of how I've written Sequestered Mind (Part 1), showing that outlining and plotting your story first, no matter how detailed your outline is, doesn't have to stunt your creativity or ruin the writing process, and it can be as flexible as you need it to be.