Outlining vs. Organic Writing
September 5th, 2009
I outlined Summeryear to no end.
It was a little over a month between the first idea and me actually sitting down to write the first page of the rough draft. I would write out extensive dot jot notes in the beginning, then think up scenes on sticky notes and rearrange them until they vaguely resembled something like a story. Then, used those notes to write in- depth chapter summaries. After that I’d make charts about each chapter, organizing what each scene would do for the story and how the characters would evolve.
I don’t think all that was necessary. But hey, I like being organized. The way I understand it, after some brainstorming most outliners write up paragraph summaries of their chapters before they feel ready to start writing. That’s probably enough for me as well, but I really liked the outlining bit. So I dragged it on for a while.
On the downside of that, I used up a lot of time before I had really started working. I was having a great time organizing everything, sure. But I could have started writing a couple weeks earlier. Then there’s the fact that I had decided my outline was mostly worthless after writing a dozen or so chapters. So I started over, and that time I outlined significantly less.
I liked that story a heck of a lot more than the outlined one. I still used most of the concepts I had come up with while outlining, just used everything a little differently. What did I learn that works best for myself? Outline to a general feel, but take the time to get to know your characters before you do anything else. I have a character profile* that I fill out with every new major character, some questions that help me analyze their personality and make them more concrete for myself. It’s very useful questionnaire, asking me to think about everything to do with my characters down to the last detail.
Once I had my ideas set, I loved to let my fingers work out the story in their own time. The first rough draft I wrote with the outline wasn’t very fun to write. I had to follow my guidelines too closely for it to be fun. I love being organized, but that didn’t really work for writing.
Could have just been a fluke, of course. But next time? I think I’ll try to outline as little as possible, see how it goes. Rusalka’s outline won’t get very detailed. A paragraph per chapter. Maybe I won’t even bother for the next one. We’ll see when it comes to that.
I was very, very certain that I’d be an outliner, and didn’t even think I could work better organically. Beginning writers would do well to try both methods, and a few variations in between; not just assume they already know what they’re doing.
* As incredibly useful as the questionnaire is, I don’t want to post it here. I copied it off a website sometime back when I was just starting to write at about nine years old, so I have no idea where it came from. I might try to find the source sometime, because it is very good, but just in case whoever wrote it wouldn’t like it posted without a credit, I’ll leave it out for now.
Summeryear is a story that came to me in one ecstatic moment some time around the beginning of February 2009. My then-boyfriend was describing a worldwide, year-long, see-everything-”real”, hostels-only trip he was considering. The phrase that came to me then was ‘Summeryear – chase the season’ and my characters sprung out fully-formed, albeit a little shallow at the time. I imagined teenagers who resolved to travel across the globe after high school, following the summer season throughout their destinations. Before they graduated, however, they would instead push themselves into a world of anarchy by their own impatience to leave and their loathing for the lack of culture they found in North America.