Outlines

[FineyMcFine]

I read the existing threads here in Beta Pens and while there are a few for structure and plot, there isn't one specifically devoted to outlines, so I decided to create one. If anyone thinks this should go into an existing thread, let me know.

I know that not everyone uses outlines. Writers on this board have remarked that they don't use them, and Stephen King and Charles de Lint, two of my favorite published authors, also say they don't use them. But me, I use them. It's just something that has developed as a useful tool for me over time. I tried writing a story once to just see where it went without an outline, and a chapter or two into it I found myself plotting out the rest of it, because it helped my brain to visualize what would happen next and what I needed to get done in the previous chapter in order to make the next chapter work.

I think that outlines can help a lot if you're afraid that your story will meander and you won't know how to wrap things up. Even if you change some things along the way (and I have in nearly every outline I've done) then it can be nice to have that framework to fall back on.

Anyway, what about outlines? Here are some topics for discussion:

1. Do you use outlines?
2. If so, how do you use them, and how are they helpful?
3. If you don't, why not? Do you find them confining?

[FineyMcFine]

So like I said in the previous posts, I use outlines. I use them in two ways - for the entire story, summing up each chapter, and for the chapter itself before I start writing it. Sometimes I'll take the chapter and write a descriptor for each paragraph. I unfortunately don't have any of those saved because what I do is take the outline and type over it, deleting each sentence as I write the actual prose that corresponds - helps me feel like I'm making progress.

But I do have a story outline for UberSmut - I made the outline and kept it a separate document. I changed a few things around during the writing process - the one I started with had a few things in a different order than the final. Since US didn't have the most intricate plot, I originally thought I wasn't going to need to rely as much on the outline, but I was wrong. There was one main thing I wanted to center on in each chapter, and the outline helped me keep my thoughts organized and make sure I was covering them all. The outline actually grew out of a brainstorming document that I created with my beta, discussing "What smutty fanfic scenarios crop up again and again that would be fun to lampoon?"

Here's the outline. Oh yeah, the dates were when I had originally planned to post the chapters, but they don't match up exactly because I wrote slower than I had planned (had planned for Chapter 10 to be on Anya's birthday, April 15, but the last chapter was posted on June 4 instead):

UberSmut Outline

Feb. 14, 2006
Part 1 – Kickoff
Warrior board posts announcing the project.

Feb. 21, 2006
Part 2 – Taking Charge
WT talk about the challenge, Tara takes the lead and tells Willow what to do while they are having sex.

Feb 28, 2006
Part 3 – Submission
Someone submits a smutty story about mild bondage. Willow and Tara get curious and try it out.

March. 14, 2006
Part 4 – First Time
Someone submits a first-time story – WT recall their first time, flashback.

March. 20, 2006
Part 5 – She Who Her What?
Willow and Tara can’t seem to follow who is supposed to do what during sex due to too many identical pronouns. Also perhaps some things could be physically impossible. Girls refer to “script” while doing it.

March 27, 2006
Part 6 – Want Some Fries With That?
Sex toy shop where the checkout person asks if they want all kinds of extras and they get embarrassed.

April 14, 2006
Part 7 – Naughty Places
WT reject an anal sex fic, then go try to have bathroom sex and get way too self-conscious.

April 21, 2006
Part 8 – Technically Speaking in Tongues
The author uses a lot of technical terms for womanly parts and the girls crack up, also juxtapose with too many euphemisms and overly flowery descriptions.

April 28, 2006
Part 9 – Endurance
A fic calls for an all-day sexathon, and WT get very sore and exhausted by the end.

April 30, 2006
Part 10, last part – Achingly Yours
WT go to dinner with Anya, Xander, Buffy, Angel, and have a hard time sitting still, or sitting at all. Anya thanks them for the project. Whispers to Tara that sometimes she and Xander “beta-test” the smut. Tara smiles weakly. Then snippets.

[JustSkipIt]

Sally,
Great thread. I'm kind of mixed on outlines. My first extended length story suffered greatly from a lack of outline. I knew what my initial conflict was and how that would be resolved, but I put no thought into ending the story or where/how/when it would end. So that cured me somewhat. Since then, I do a very basic outline when starting a story. In the same file in which I'm writing the story, I make sure that I know such things as:

The first chapter's events.
How/where/when it ends.
Important milestones between those.

Sometimes that's all there is to my outline. Frequently, the outline actually progresses in reverse for me. When I came up with the idea for Paths (about 2 weeks before completing Y'all), I had a dream of the how/when/where of the epilogue. Then I worked backwards from there: how would they ever get to that epilogue? The next thing I knew was the how/when/what of the last part before the epilogue including the date. Then I came up with the starting date of the fic. Then I began to fill in what was in between. The Outline said something like this:

August 7 - Willow at grave.
August 8 - Willow does spell
Meets new Tara
Sees art
December 21 - sends mail, scatters hair, etc.
Epilogue

At the time, that was pretty extensive for me.

The only story on which I've truly outlined it was Survivor: Ash Island and I feel very much that I was forced to do that. I don't have the outline any longer (I'm an anti pack-rat) but that outline was very extensive. At the top was a list of the two teams by name, each member, and the demo on the member. It also had the week that person would be voted off and the final votes. (yes, that means that anyone getting a hold of that file would have known all the answers).

Then I outlined every episode so it looked like this:
Episode 1 - Days 1 -3: Reward/Immunity Challenge (Building and running on planks) - won by Mfashnek. Wes voted out (7-1).

In the middle of the story when the teams changed and again when they merged, I put the new team alignments in the outline file and continued with the episode by episode.

Then was the real challenge: plotting the real life into the spaces in the episodes. I knew that I needed W/T in NY for Willow's vote off show and for the finale. I needed Willow to call immediately following the first episode and I plotted in all the firsts: making love, saying I love you, etc. Then I needed to fill in the what else they do...

It was the only story that I've ever outlined like that and I'll say that it was definitely the easiest and funnest story I've ever written. But I'm not sure that the easy and fun is because of the outline.

I've rambled. Do I feel like outlines are valuable? Without a doubt in the world. Do I want to use them? Well, not really because I just want to dive in and start writing without all that planning. It's like cleaning your room or doing a chore and it's not as fun as getting to drive fast... Woo hoo!

[inlerf]

i'm the type who has to have an outline. without one, i feel like the story is a big fat blob of shapeless mass and i can't quite write the story, since i don't know where to go and when. also, the lack of details and plot-pots (holes) irk me. another thing with needing an outline is that it forces me to think through everything, like, for example, uh, what color is willow's bedsheets or how dawn should/will mature. otherwise, i'll just skim through and produce a skeleton (and think that's good, omgad).

having read through all the beta pens threads and was enlightened on what's a theme and etc, an outline makes me stick close to what i want to achieve with each character, their relationships with one another, dadida.

in fact, do you mean outline as in it must be a physical general idea of what you're gonna do or can it be floating in your head, and that a non-outline is typing the story impromptu?

and omg, sally, your willow banana smite avatar looks gross. ;x

[justin]

I generally use outlines. I find working out the plot of a story to be easier than actually writing it so I generally have most of the plot worked out before I write it.

What I tend to do is leave comments describing each of the scenes that I want to write, then I delete the comments as I write the scenes.

Of course the finished story will often be different from the outline since I'll be coming up with new ideas while I'm writing it.

This is a section of a story I'm working on the draft of

-Buffy reaches XA

-BXA get home *

-Buffy and Willow argue

-They set off for the hospital

-WTA magically fortify the hospital

They're mainly just reminders of the main thing that happens in each scene.

[inlerf]

In Tools for Writers and Beta Readers,

I've just come across a handy tool for planning your fic...this depends how your brain works (some people find just writing it out in a linear way easier, I prefer to have stuff organised under headings and subheadings etc so that it's visually easier to look at and find stuff).

Treepad.

http://www.nlsoftware.com/download/treepad.zip

Just lets you create a simple 'tree' (kinda like windows explorer) where you can add details in and search through it etc. I haven't got around to using it myself, but I might start using it soon.

i find it very helpful. much more efficient and easier to find/look at than having sheets of paper for characters' relationships that i have to flip flip flip through to find one thing, or using word which is so linear and difficult to understand how really intricate those relationships are.

[The_Lord_J]

I started using treepad recently, works a tree-t (uh...sorry...).

Seriously though, in terms of outlines one of the fics I'm working on (and I use that term loosely considering I've done very little on it for months) started life as a brief outline - literally one-line descriptions...by the time I got to part 6 or 7 it had ended up being 3 or 4 lines...by the time I got to ten we were talking paragraphs...so I went back and added detail into the first few chapters to kinda 'make up the detail' to match the rest of the plan/outline/whatever you want to call it...and inevitably, the same happened again, and I went back and added even more detail...and so on...

And now pretty much the only thing I'm missing is some more descriptive writing and the dialogue itself. The rest of the fic has sort of written itself.

HOWEVER...I do find this type of writing to be less fun than just starting with one sentence and seeing where you end up (which is what I'm doing with 'Alpha Plus'). There's no plan there, so it kinda forces you to be creative in digging your way out of holes that you've dug yourself, which can have quite interesting results...however, sometimes it backfires and you find you've completely painted yourself into a corner and have nowhere to go, whereupon you start to lose some interest.

I think it depends on how seriously you are approaching the fic. E.g. my 'big' fic that I'm working on is pretty well planned out, but my sort of 'fun, have a quick blast and see what happens' fic [Alpha Plus] has no planning, but has got a hell of a lot more done in the same amount of time.

So I think it's very possible to do it either way, but it's horses for courses - some things will work better for some people than other things.

Equally, for me Treepad is great because my brain works that way - it likes heirarchies (sp?). It likes clicking a '+' symbol to get more detail, whereas it finds a big bunch of (non-bullet-pointed) text with lots of ideas difficult to deal with. I'm a list person more than a paragraph person (which is why I was infinitely better at Business Studies in school than I ever was at English), but a lot of other people work the opposite way - some people find bullet points too vague or too constricting for their creative flow.

As for whether I stick to them...well, that's a different story altogether. When I started connections, that was half-outlined, half-blagged - I kinda changed the outline a LOT as I went along, and then realised it was now going nowhere and I couldn't remember much about the original idea, so I lost interest and the whole thing ground to a halt. The bits that I stuck to were useful though - and it was great to have something to refer back to when writing the later stuff; just finishing a chapter, then reading quickly through the outline and realising 'oh, I can't do that because of this that happened earlier...' or 'damn, I'd forgotten about that!' etc etc - a lot easier than reading your whole damn fic again!

So pick whatever suits you best Try both, and see what happens. I tried just writing paragraphs of stuff, and eventually found myself separating them out into sentences...then cutting the sentences down to the key points...then adding bullets...and finally ended up with a list of events rather than a flowing paragraph. But that's just me.

Have I been of any use in posting this? Possibly not, but hopefully someone will find it interesting at least.