On Outlining

I'm not much of an outliner, more of a 'headlight' outliner. So mine are somewhat middling of what you've posted.

I have a beginning, a few parts of the middle, and the end.

Perhaps what you should try is making a list of possibilities. Not something set in stone, but stuff that comes to you while you're NOT writing. Kind of like your first list, where the dog or Sally could be drawn out over several scenes. Does he end up in the hospital from a dog bite? Does he start stalking Sally? Does he kill the dog and then find out it is Sally's? Maybe the dog is a robot. Maybe Old Man Hally is Sally's father, and although the protag loves Miss Sally, he can't reconcile with his molester (her father). Maybe Sally is his mother. Or sister. Or she's a borg, bent on aquiring his DNA.

IOW, find the possibilites, and go from there.

I tend to do the outlines for my long works a lot like I was taught to in school. Habit I guess. I don't outline for short work at all.

Anyway, I start with a central idea and use it for a heading, and I organize the basic flow of the story from my initial impressions of how I think it will go. I end up adding a few semi-major headings to fill things in for plot twists and such once I have the basic idea laid out. Then I start to frame the story. By the end, the big heading is the central idea for the book, each of the subheads is a chapter, and then the five or six ideas below that are scenes or important conversations.

I. Bobby finds a dog
A. Bobby was standing outside the ice cream parlor
1. Bobby has just odered his favorite ice cream (cookie dough?)
2. Bobby walks toward his house and runs into one of his friends
3. They talk about the events of the day
B. Bobby is home and settled in for dinner
1. The family eats steak and mac and cheese
2. Bobby has to clean up the kitchen and take the trash out
3. When Bobby takes the trash out, he hears a strange rustling in the bushes
C. Bobby and the dog
1. As Bobby approaches the bushes, he hears a growling
2. A puppy-sized dog jumps out at him and barks (playfully)
3. Bobby takes the dog inside and asks him mom if he can keep it.

Granted, this is a horrid, off the cuff example and I would have thrown it in the trash before I ever got *this* far, but it illustrates most of my point.

Every major singular piece of data or scene change is its own line item. It keeps things clean and simple. In the end the outline works as a really good map for your story (since you've essentially written everything out without filling in the small detail), but there's still enough information left in the actual telling of the story for it to be flexible when (and yes, that is definitely when and not if) your story changes.

Hope that gives you some good ideas that you can use.

Amiton.

In most plots there is interaction between the characters. So instead of having everything start with Billy, let Sally, your Villain if you have one, and chance/the world have some turns. Also, start larger scale then work your way smaller - your first example looks like an outline for a short story or a single chapter, not a novel.

So start at the highest level - try to summarize your story in one or two sentences. For example:

Billy the coward repeatedly tries to force himself to be brave in an attempt to impress Sally, the girl he likes, and then in an attempt to save himself and Sally from the aliens. But at the end it turns out that it is his cowardly instincts which save the world and Sally things his timidness is cute, so he learns to relax a little and work with his instincts rather than against them.

Now, how do we turn this into an outline? We want to figure out our initial incident, where we actually want the story to begin, the climax, and where we want the story to end. Then we want to insert some complications and/or reversals to make our Freytag's pyramid complete.

Initial Incident of Main Plot: Aliens become a threat.
Story Start Possibilities:
1) Aliens invade and the main character sees it
2) Aliens invade but the main character doesn't know about it and makes an attempt to impress the girl
3) The main character tries to impress the girl, who tells the boy aliens are invading and he's not sure whether to believe her
4) The main character tries to impress the girl and fails; aliens show up afterwards.
5) The main character is established as a 'boy who cried wolf' type or delusional science fiction fan so no one will believe him when the aliens show up (or establish some other important conflict)

Me, I'm going to pick 2 because I like the dramatic irony of it.

Climax: Cowardly instincts somehow defeat the aliens
Story End: Boy accepts himself and gets girl. (Alternately, either of these might happen immediately before the climax.) Aliens leave, possibly no adults have noticed anything, and life goes back to normal.

So now we have:
Prologue: Show the reader that aliens are invading, but none of the characters know yet.
Chapter One: Establish Billy as a coward trying to force himself to be brave and desiring Sally. Show the failure of his attempt to impress Sally and him leaving, upset. (Might be two chapters.)
Chapter ?: Billy notices the aliens, it becomes clear to the reader what sort of problems the aliens are going to cause
Chapter ?: Billy angsts over whether to try to do something about the aliens or hide until it's over. He decides to warn Sally.
Complication: Billy gains new info about the aliens but the aliens have started doing things which might trap Billy - he barely avoids being caught in the first trap. (Sally might be along for the ride.)
Chapter ?: Trying as firmly as possible to force himself to be brave, Billy formulates a plan to defeat the aliens.
Chapter ?: They try to execute the plan and it fails miserably, alerting the aliens who now switch into high gear.
4th-To-Last Chapter: All hell breaks loose as the aliens start putting for their full effort to either capture/kill the kids or take over the world. The kids try to dodge the chaos while approaching the aliens' area of vulnerability. This could go on for several chapters with a different trial in each chapter. Perhaps Sally is captured or something precious to her is threatened.
3rd-To-Last Chapter: It's desperately important to defeat the aliens now, everyone is in danger and only Billy can do it; he wants to do it mainly to protect Sally.
2nd-To-Last Chapter: Billy's cowardliness defeats the aliens.
Last Chapter: Billy and Sally get together, some philosophising about cowardliness.
Epilogue: What becomes of the aliens, life goes back to mostly-normal.

So, there's your outline. It's more movie-length than book length, so for a novel it could be lengthened by weaving in more characters or subplots.

Hopefully not too many people will get hung up on the examples. They aren't a story I would write, but I got the idea of where you were trying to go with it.

Different people work in different ways. Some people do outline as in the first case (Uncle Jim comes to mind), and others like the second. I use outlining to establish some story or other significant details rather than working out every detail, as that tends to ruin the immediacy of my writing. Each one of us who does outline is going to have a variation on how we outline. More of a hybrid approach if you will.

I like to think of the outlining work I do more as "waypoints" or "beacons" on a beach. Plant a couple in the beginning, a few more in the middle to keep me on track and then more at the end. Until I write the scenes themselves, I don't revise the outline. Heck, usually I don't even look at the outline again after writing it, but then again I'm a kinetic learner. Then around the 70+% mark, I might revisit, see if there are gaps between my scenes and the outline, figure out if I need to write "re-stake" the beacons or simply finish the remaining scenes.

Outlining is a tool. Like any art, some tools all artists use, and some tools only a portion use. If you are finding yourself off-track from the story you want to write, then maybe outlining is good for you. Like any tool it will take some practice to become proficient with it. You can't expect outlining to solve all your writerly issues, but it might help with a few.

In the future, as you write, jot down on a notepad (or, if you're like me, an Excel spreadsheet) what you have just written in that chapter.

Then, you can track your plot explosions a little as you go. When you're done, go back over the spreadsheet and edit it down to whatever size you need.

This also gives you a quick one-glance refresher on what's going on in your work.

Also useful is a rough outline in your Excel spreadsheet. then, at the end of your writing day, you can drift off to the right indefinitely as you fill in your changes. Quick glance over the rest of the outline to see how that alters your future path and voila!

As far as your current dilemma, just keep re-writing and revising until you get something that looks right. Poke around and see if you can find outlines of films and books posted as examples.

Angst and Outlining

Akuma said:

Billy goes home.


Because, somehow, the second one seems too easy.

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Outlining can be very helpful. I use it when I hit a point in a story and there seems to be something unbalanced. So it has an angst-defusing aspect.

Usually, the effort of outlining lets me see alternatives and then I pick one and don't write another outline until something else goes wrong.

On the other hand I do keep a kind of running synopsis going at the bottom of the current chapter-in progress....a synopsis which often does not come to pass or synapse or syncope.

Dru said:

...I use outlining to establish some story or other significant details rather than working out every detail, as that tends to ruin the immediacy of my writing. Each one of us who does outline is going to have a variation on how we outline. More of a hybrid approach if you will.

I like to think of the outlining work I do more as "waypoints" or "beacons" on a beach. Plant a couple in the beginning, a few more in the middle to keep me on track and then more at the end. Until I write the scenes themselves, I don't revise the outline. Heck, usually I don't even look at the outline again after writing it, but then again I'm a kinetic learner. Then around the 70+% mark, I might revisit, see if there are gaps between my scenes and the outline, figure out if I need to write "re-stake" the beacons or simply finish the remaining scenes.

Outlining is a tool. Like any art, some tools all artists use, and some tools only a portion use. If you are finding yourself off-track from the story you want to write, then maybe outlining is good for you. Like any tool it will take some practice to become proficient with it. You can't expect outlining to solve all your writerly issues, but it might help with a few.

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I have to heavily agree. I personally don't revise my outline at all unless I have to, but that's because it's entertaining for me to see how differently things turn out than my specific plan. There are so many little details that affect the story in the most profound ways, and you have to go where the story takes you (or at least I do).

For the most part, my outline is to flesh out the outer meat of my story, and once I'm done with the outline I don't need to look at it again unless I forget where I was going in the story. Only on very rare exceptions has the story gotten so far away from my outline that it just broke everything and I had to scrap and rewrite one or the other =)

Amiton.

Akuma said:

Does a writer always have to scrap it?
I assume what you wrote, though not expected at all, was still written well and with every intent of being told.

Then again, I also understand wanting to write that story, the story you are determined to tell.

Another curse/blessing of being a writer, I guess.

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Does a writer always have to scrap the writing? Absolutely not. If something is well written and the story can still get where it needs to go then it's golden as far as I'm concerned. The outline is what needs updating =p

If your well-written prose takes the story to such a drastically new place that your original story is all but lost then you have a decision - you can either chase the new story or pitch what you wrote and see what you can do to wwrangle things back in line. Even then, I recommend trying to salvage as much of your beautiful, flowing prose as possible =)

Amiton.

Akuma said:

Does a writer always have to scrap it?
I assume what you wrote, though not expected at all, was still written well and with every intent of being told.

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A writer doesn't have to scrap it. To be clear, a writer doesn't HAVE to do a single damned thing, except for tell a good story which entertains people. Heck, sometimes it's not even a good story, but if it entertains people, then it's fine. Everything else are just methods for getting there and none of them are set in stone.

Akuma said:

I've always been a Wing-It kind of writer, myself, but I've been trying to take a stab at outlining.
While I do know how to outline, I don't know how to outline. Personally, it boggle my mind out you outliners do it. I've heard that you'll go plan every single thing at once (though, of course, things will change while you actually write it).
How can you know every single thing? Surely you don't wait to write before knowing everything?

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While I do outline, I could never outline the way that was described. That sounds a little too much like writing scenes on index cards, which makes me shudder to think about it. Ick! Far too structured for me. Rather, I tend to focus on what will set the story up, including the backstory (instead of putting it in the first fifty pages ). My main goal is to work out the setup because if that doesn't work, the rest of the book won't work.

Do I know everything? No. In fact, the story is very flexible, and it's in a state of constant evolution.

My outlines tend to look like this, only messier:

Billy is a werewolf vampire half-werewolf, half-vampire who is running for president. The story opens with an assassination attempt a debate where he turns into a wolf in the middle of answering a question. When this happens, a nut in the audience tries to kill Billy.

My outlines are very casual. I've even inserted puns and in-jokes into outlines. I guess by joking about the story, I am more relaxed and thus able to write the outline. And even if I don't wind up writing that story, I can always recycle the jokes later.

My outlines always start with "Call me Ishmael."

I start with a synopsis and go from there into two directions-- some short scenes that may later become part of the book or not, or may become separate canonical shorts. When I have a feel for things a bit I write an outline that has maybe one or two sentences per chapter, and occasionally has holes where I know there needs to be a chapter, but I'm not sure exactly how things happen in it. And I fill in who the main characters in each scene are ("hey, we haven't seen Bill for awhile, we need him here!" "Oops, no, I killed him in seventeen." "Well, what's Gordon doing about now?") Once I know who's where, I can pretty much fill in those blanks. If I know I have Sylvie and Joan in a scene, it's obviously a lot different than if I have Sylvie and Bill, or Sylvie and Gordon and Joan.
And because I don't write in order (some days I'm just not in the mood to deal with Sylvie's whiny self), the outline reminds me that there's a plot thread resolved in seventeen that I need to start rolling when I get around to writing three through five.
But as far as "Bill went to the store. Bill parked in the handicapped spot even though he's not eligible. Bill considered buying eggs. Bill bought dynamite instead."....nah. Not that detailed. More like "Bill gets implements of destruction."

There's that word AGAIN *Outlining*

Runs off screaming into the night!

My second and third wave of ideas are almost invariably better than the first. Outlining for me is a waste of time.

Slightly off topic, but there is an alternative approach that I saw on some author's website that really appealed to me (although I admit that I haven't tried it yet).

He suggested boiling your story down to a single sentence - two at most. That becomes a concise pitch-line for your story. Then expand it to a paragraph, and ultimately that would become the equivilent of a blurb. After that, expand it into three or four paragraphs, and those can frame your query letter. Expand to longer lengths and settle on one that would make a good synopsis.

All of the major points are filled in at this point, but there's still a major path to experience while you're writing. If you need structure then you have a strong basis for an outline. If not, then you have a strong framework to work from that will hold your story together while you're writing by the seat of your pants (and probably enjoying it immensely if that's how you write).

Not to mention the added benefit of having a good baseline for all of the dreaded deliverables that are written after the fact to convince a publisher or agent to scoop up your ms!

Amiton.

Amiton said:

Slightly off topic, but there is an alternative approach that I saw on some author's website that really appealed to me (although I admit that I haven't tried it yet).

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This sounds like Ranall Ingermanson's Snowflake Method. You can google "snowflake method" or go here: http://www.rsingermanson.com/html/the_snowflake.html

He's one of the authors the editor from Bethany House referred to when someone asked her if it's possible to write Christian Science Fiction... (Oh where oh where did that little thread go? I can't find it. An editor from Bethany House just did a Q & A recently...)

ltd.

Snowflake method sounds familiar =) It's been ages since I've actually been out to the website that I saw it on, but it rings a bell - although the name doesn't...maybe this guy's idea is a credited derivative of the snowflake method.

It's late and I'm writing run-on sentences...I must be tired.

Amiton.

I have tried to work without an outline and find that without some kind of structure my characters just wander around aimlessly until they fall right off the page.

I have to know where the story is going before I start writing it. If Billy is going to end up with Sally or if he ends up on his death bed because of his encounter with Shredder, never knowing that Sally has been secretly carrying a torch for him, I have to know it right from the beginning.

I start with a central idea and then more or less list everything I want to happen in the story. I call this my incident list. Once I have the list finished I start writing, one incident at a time. Sometimes I work in the order of my list, sometimes I just work on whichever incidents interest me the most first. After I finish working from the list I put the scenes in a logical order and then fill in whatever gaps are left. This becomes my first draft.

It sounds like more work than it really is.

I have a friend who thinks about her idea for a couple of weeks, then sits down and writes from start to finish; no outlining, no stopping. She doesn't do a lot of revising either.

The point is, there are as many ways to write as there are writers. Whether you outline or not is purely up to you. And if you outline then the kind of outline you use depends on what works best for you as well.

More like the fisrt one only not as much small details as large details. I find it best to start writing without making a plan but even when you do that you still need a rough idea where you're heading and also you get ideas as you write so sooner or later you have to jot these down or you will lose the plot - thats where your outline comes in.

Best outline ever:

Protagonist and Girlfriend are interrupted in throes of passion by Bad Guys.

Protagonist tries to save world; almost succeeds. Is saved at last possible second by girlfriend.

Throes of passion continue uninterrupted.

Write an outline as you'd tell it in the pub...

Lot's of "but..." and "however..." The outline should read like a story.

I wrote up the technique while wearing a different hat, but here's the meat:

Phase 1: Pub Pitch
There's this man - a woodcutter. <Gulps beer> He comes home to find his home has gone! Wife, children, granny. All utterly vanished.... I said utterly vanished! Jeez! Do they have to have that jukebox so loud? So, he goes to the wisewoman...
Phase 2: Starbucks Oral Narrative John's a woodcutter. Everyday, he goes... yes, the latte's mine, cheers - into the woods and cuts wood for the charcoal burners until it's too dark to swing his axe. Then his feet carry him home just in time to catch his children as they fall asleep. <slurps coffee> Only, tonight, instead of taking him to his welcoming threshold, his feet take him to a bare patch in the clearing where his cottage should stand. What can he do? The only person who can possibly help him is Psycho Wendy, the aging half-crazed suspected werewolf who lives high in the Sinister Crags...
Phase 3: PC Outline
JOHN returns home to find his cottage - including family - gone. Perhaps the MAD WENDY, the wisewoman can help? However, she's (i) a dangerous suspected werewolf, and (ii) lives high on the side of Maiden's Plummet (see sketch map)...

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Taking the original example failed outline:
Billy: The Chronicles

Billy leaves house emotionally distraught.
Billy tries to think of the one place he can feel safe at.
Billy remembers a comforting experience at the drug store.
Billy makes his way down the sidewalk.
Billy sees Sally, a girl he really likes.
Billy tries to impress Sally.
Billy realizes his fly is open.
Billy feels more dristraught emotions.
Billy runs as fast as he can.
Billy reaches the store.
Billy enters the store with brooding thoughts.
Billy wanders around, brooding some more.
Billy gets some milk as an excuse for having gone to the store.
Billy makes his way back home.
Billy encounters a large dog.
Billy feels terrified when he realizes it's Old Man Hally's dog, Shredder.
Billy remembers an awkward encounter with Old man Hally.
Billy runs like hell.
Billy reaches home in time.
Billy bursts through the door, Shredder snarling right behind him.

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I get

Billy: The Chronicles - Chapter 1

A distraught Billy heads for comfort of the drug store, but stops to chat up Sally instead. He acts all cool, but his flies are open. Feeling even worse, he flees to the drug store, but finds he can only brood. He heads home, but encounters Shredder, the dog belonging to the unpleasant Old Man Hally. Billy runs like hell, but the dog follows him. He just manages to close the door in Shredder's face, but the dog lays siege. Now he must get rid of it before his mum gets home, but without upsetting Old Man Hally.

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The chapter itself would appear in the novel outline as:

Chapter 1: Billy goes to town to cheer himself up, but makes a fool of himself in front of Sally. Worse, he falls foul of Shredder. He escapes the dog, but it lays siege to his house. Can he get rid of it before Mum returns, without angering Old man Hally, its owner?

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The outline is just a reader's digest version of the first draft.